I spent a while today reading up on bump mapping theory. I wanted to know how it worked to see if it was worth the trouble to implement in the demo. After reading the first few lines of the first article I realized that simple bump mapping was insanely simple. Just a few lines setting up the texture stage states, set the bump map texture and away I go. I know there are many more advanced ways to get cooler effects but for what I wsant to do its great.

One of my few small tasks was irradicated by the existance of the D3DXComputeNormalMap function. I expect getting bump mapping up and running on the cement of the scene shouldn't take me more than a few hours. It'll take the artist a while longer to get the heightmap right, but its gotta be done.

Didn't get anymore coding done today though. I had to go off to practice with the band I'm in. My pick broke about halfway through so I spent a good hour hammering powercords with my finger. I'm well used to it but it doesn't change the fact that it shredded the skin above my nail.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to make a small bump mapping trial app to get the code right before I import it into the demo. Should be fun. All these techniques really aren't as daunting as they seem once you've read the theory behind them.