Hacker News Reader

does displacement mapping not hold up in VR?

I think displacement maps are often made by starting with high detailed models and converting some of the smaller details to normal, bump, reflection? maps etc.

correct. the process is called texture baking. however, displacement uses displacement maps, which are grayscale, essentially depth maps. displacement is not very useful for realtime rendering because then the displacement has to be calculated in realtime. displacement is mostly used in offline rendering. realtime rendering just uses normal maps.

It absolutely does, I don't quite get comments here. All VR games use normal assets with all their normal (map) shenanigans. It works the same as on desktop. Sure if you look at something super close the "illusion" breaks, but it has nothing to do with VR, same thing happens in flat screen games.

Maybe people mistakenly think that most standalone Quest games don't have those maps because they don't work? Well it's not the case. The standalone games (especially on Q2 vs Q3) have just very low performance budget. You strip out what you can to make your game render in 90 fps for each eye (each eye uses a different camera perspective so each frame scene has to be rendered twice).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com