Hi Michael > What are these conecpts and what do they allow the programmer to do? Bump mapping tries to get the illusion of subgeometry inside a triangle by changing the normal and biVector at each pixel inside the triangle. This works quite well if the user isn't very close. It's similair to texture-mapping but instead puting color informations on the corresponding pixels it alters the normal values at the pixel. For more information check Foley et Al Computer Graphics & Principles or Watt & Watt Advanced Rendering and Animation Techniques, Blinn's Originalpaper from 1981(2?) or your favourite CG Book. There are also several fake methods out there.
Cube mapping is a sort of reflection mapping trying to reflect the surrounding of a object in a object. It's uses 6 Maps (for each cube side one). These maps show the scene from a camera inside the cube in the six directions of a cube (six sides). There are also other methods like spherical, or parabolic environment/reflection mapping. I think parabolic is actually the best and needs only 2 maps but is only supported in hardware by ATIs Radeon series. IIRC > Does Java3D support either of these concepts? Not that I know. But I think there are subjects of later implementations like 1.4 EOF, J.D. -- Jmark2k+1 (http://www.antiflash.net/jmark) Test the performance of your PC online! =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
