michiel | 8 years ago | 7 comments | 9 likes | 3.0K views

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BluffTitler version 12.3 supports HDR displacement maps.

All textures in BlufffTiter are stored in LDR (32 bits RGBA), but an exception is made for displacementmaps. If your texture is a 16 bits greyscale PNG with a filename containing the text 'displacement' or 'heightmap', it is stored as an HDR greyscale texture (16 bits R). This prevents the terracing effect when rendering landscapes with heightmaps.

The terminology is confusing:

Displacementmaps, heightmaps and bumpmaps

Displacementmaps, heightmaps and bumpmaps are different names for the very same technique: storing heights in a greyscale picture. Black is low, white is high. BluffTitler uses the name displacementmap. The above screenshot has been rendered with the Displacementmap effect.

HDR and LDR

I believe HDR (High Dynamic Range) is everything that uses more than 8 bits per colour component. So 16 bits is HDR and 8 bits is LDR (Low Dynamic Range)

8 bits and 16 bits

This refers to the number of bits per colour component. A picture with an alpha channel has 4 components: red, green, blue and alpha. A greyscale picture has only one. So a HDR greyscale picture uses 16 bits per pixel. And a normal LDR picture with an alpha channel uses 4x8=32 bits per pixel.

HDR and picture file formats

Not all picture file formats support HDR. PNG supports 16 bits. JPG does not.

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