What is BumpMapping?

Bump mapping is an old technology that has recently come to the scene. Matrox was the first to really promote various forms of bump mapping in popular 3D gaming a few years ago. It's all about creating a texture that shows the way light falls on a surface, to show bumps or cavities in a surface.

Bump mapping doesn't move with lights-- it's designed to be used for creating small imperfections on a surface, not for large bumps. For instance, you could use bump mapping to create seeming randomness to a terrain's detail in a flight simulator, rather than use the same texture repeatedly, which doesn't look very interesting (or realistic).

Bump mapping creates a good deal more apparent surface detail, although there's a certain amount of sleight of hand going on here, since by strict definition it doesn't change relative to your viewing angle. Given the per-pixel operations that the newer ATI and nVidia cards can perform, this default viewing angle drawback isn't really a hard and fast rule anymore. Either way, it hasn't been used that much by game developers since until recently; the power of bump-mapping is yet to be explored by more games. With cards from Geforce3 onwards, game developers can now create combined effects such as Bump maps with reflections and textures. This will make effects such as water ripples and corrugated metallic surfaces more realistic than ever.

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