We present a per-pixel displacement mapping method that provides high accuracy as well as real-time performance. This arises from the observation that we can safely skip empty regions by moving a ray to the maximum height value. We store this bounding information in the image pyramid of a heighfield texture. In our method, a ray along view direction advances hierarchically via this pyramid structure. This method, called pyramidal displacement mapping, guarantees finding the correct intersections on any heightfield and viewing conditions. This article explains implementation details with more accessible illustrations and descriptions for 3D application developers. Additionally, we introduce a new LOD technique to improve rendering performance and quality.

Download: - Technical Article - Shader (NVIDIA FX Composer 2.x)

Hyunwoo Ki, and Kyoungsu Oh. "Accurate Per-Pixel Displacement Mapping using a Pyramid Structure". Aug. 2007.

"The Second-Prize Winner". The Shade Your World competition sponsored by NVIDIA, GameDev.net, and Softimage. November 2007.

Kyoungsu Oh, Hyunwoo Ki, and Cheol-Hi Lee. "Pyramidal Displacement Mapping: a GPU based Artifacts-Free Ray Tracing through an Image Pyramid". In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology 2006, pp. 75-82.

- Policarpo et al. "Real-Time Relief Mapping on Arbitrary Polygonal Surfaces". In ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games Proceedings, ACM Press, pp. 359-368. (Providing shader code for relief mapping, and textures)

- Szirmay-Kalos and Umenhoffer. "Displacement Mapping on the GPU — State of the Art". Computer Graphics Forum.
- Tevs et al. "Maximum Mipmaps for Fast, Accurate, and Scalable Dynamic Height Field Rendering". In Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games.