Abstract: While displacement maps can provide a rich set of visual detail on otherwise simple surfaces they have been traditionally very expensive to render. Rendering has only been done with ray tracing or by introducing a great number of micro-polygons.

We present an image-based approach by showing that rendering displacement maps is sufficiently similar to image warping and introduce a new warping algorithm which is particularly well suited for this task. It allows us to efficiently model complicated shapes with just a few displacement mapped polygons and render them at interactive rates.