Bumpmapping with topography data

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
1

I’ve written an application that renders data acquired by a surface topography gage. Currently, I am computing vertex normals for lighting and using a 1D texture for applying a color gradient. Everything looks ver good, but I’m running into some performance problems with large data sets when using lower end video cards. The large data sets are around 512x512 data points.

I’ve been thinking about how I can an increase in performance. 90% of the time the entire data set is in view so frustum culling would not help me. I know this is similar to rendering terrains and I was curious if using a bumpmap texture would give the cool lighting (or close) that I’m getting now, but render more quickly. I’m not familiar with the topic (obviously), but I’m willing to learn more if it seems like it would help my app.

Any thoughts?

Thanks
Pat

2

Using bumpmapping will even give you much cooler results than you have now but it is also much slower than vertex lighting.
And furthermore the low end cards that have problems with 512*512 polys won’t support bump mapping. So that doesn’t help you.

What you could try is using a mesh simplification algorithm like ROAM or similar to reduce your polycount.