Hi Roland,
I've been thinking about some kind of bump mapping, e.g. for the rough surface on the angled side of slope bricks. I see two possible problems:
1. I don't think the slope bricks actually notate their angled side as smooth and the flat sides as rough. (Is there a tag or meta data I don't know about here?)
2. Most of the time the 'grain' of the bump mapping will be much smaller than screen pixels, so to look good the bump mapping scheme and specular lighting equation have to minify. LEAN mapping (http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/papers/lean/) is a good candidate here - it copes with mipmapping nicely and for a few 'reference' materials, the extra VRAM costs are quite affordable.
From what I can tell from the bricks I have in my office, there is some subtle variation in the normal directions of 'smooth' sides of bricks, and possibly the edges of the bricks are beveled. Does anyone know of a write-up on the micro-level details of lego bricks? (I know lego is famous for their mold precision, so I have to think that someone is paying attention to such details.) These would matter to a high-quality render because they 'bend' reflections and (in the case of edges) sometimes catch bright lights.
Cheers
Ben
I've been thinking about some kind of bump mapping, e.g. for the rough surface on the angled side of slope bricks. I see two possible problems:
1. I don't think the slope bricks actually notate their angled side as smooth and the flat sides as rough. (Is there a tag or meta data I don't know about here?)
2. Most of the time the 'grain' of the bump mapping will be much smaller than screen pixels, so to look good the bump mapping scheme and specular lighting equation have to minify. LEAN mapping (http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/papers/lean/) is a good candidate here - it copes with mipmapping nicely and for a few 'reference' materials, the extra VRAM costs are quite affordable.
From what I can tell from the bricks I have in my office, there is some subtle variation in the normal directions of 'smooth' sides of bricks, and possibly the edges of the bricks are beveled. Does anyone know of a write-up on the micro-level details of lego bricks? (I know lego is famous for their mold precision, so I have to think that someone is paying attention to such details.) These would matter to a high-quality render because they 'bend' reflections and (in the case of edges) sometimes catch bright lights.
Cheers
Ben