Improved Normal Mapping
The first release of ShaderFX supported tangent space normal mapping which allows artists to add details to a model while keeping the polygon count low. ShaderFX 1.5 extends these capabilities by including support for Object Space normal mapping. Object Space normal mapping can be cheaper to compute and can look better than Tangent Space normal mapping in some cases.
Game artists want to compress textures to fit as much detail as possible into limited texture memory. However, texture compression can really compromise the quality of a normal map. ShaderFX 1.5 overcomes this limitation by including support for DXT5 normal map compression. This feature allows normal maps to be compressed by a four to one ratio while still maintaining high quality. In addition to these new features, the new version also ships with a bump map node which allows artists to use traditional gray-scale bump mapping in place of or together with normal mapping.
|