A texture mapping technique developed by Manuel Oliveira, Gary Bishop, and David McAllister and presented at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans. Conventional texture mapping paints a two-dimensional graphic onto the surface of a three-dimensional object. This technique works well if the texture is flat, like wood grain or a painting, but if it is a dimensional texture like bricks in a wall, the result often looks distorted when viewed from an angle.

Relief texture mapping solves this problem by applying two transformations to the textures themselves, one to simulate vertical perspective and one more for horizontal persepctive. These transformations are done using software and require relatively little additional overhead from the hardware already being used. The result is a texture that looks three-dimensional when applied to a flat surface without adding any more polygons to the virtual space.

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