@gaieus said:
Hehe. You got me. I should go back to school. 😄
Does IRender do displacement mapping? I did not know that, great!
Yes - but we haven't found a great use for it yet. We worked on a ruby to create bump maps and displacement maps from SketchUp models. Basically you render the scene - say a wall with 3D depth - or a window treatment - of rocks - with a camera point straight on - in OpenGL - but save a greyscale image using the Z-depth for the intensity, and then use it as a bump map or displacement map. (This could be done purely in Ruby as well by getting the Z-distance at each pixel and creating an image using the Z-distances for greyscale intensity)
It was hard to find a good example for it. e.g. Background windows which would have many fewer faces in SketchUp - but still render will from different angles because of the mapping.
Here is a sample from of the image from the procedure - which we wrote for experimentation but never put into a product.
http://wiki.renderplus.com/images/d/d3/Rock-bump-images.jpg
The problem was creating a SketchUp model good enough to use for the bump maps. A brick wall would be easy - but it also easy to create a decent bump map for brick using Paint.
So you need a more complex sculptured surface - or rocks. When we asked at the time no one could supply a good model of rocks which would be useful for creating a bump map or displacement map image.