advanced rendering for AutoCAD
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Considering all the great ideas people have asked Roy to incorporate into nXt for the past few years, I suspect you can fur-get it for a while. Although it might make a good grass. Fur, the other meat.
If that is te case, you can use bump on the texture map. Every texture you like. I'm affraid you ask the best of both worlds. 3d displacement and fast rendering time. As Peter already mentioned, procedural bumps don't have a euhmm...displacement.
Actually, what Miguel is describing is usually implemented as a "hyper-texture". This is a volumetric technique that probably fits between displacement and bump mapping on a continuum. It is expensive to render and non-trivial to implement, so don't look for it any time soon. In terms of user-demand, I think I've had one other request for it. It is something I have been thinking about, though. I doubt if it will be much faster than displacements (it may be slower.)
Here are some examples of hypertexture from Ken Perlin (one of the original inventors.)
Bump and normal maps use similar technology and produce similar results. Normal maps need to be generated by 3rd party products.
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