Real-time 3D Character Animation with Visual C++

6	Texture mapping

Since we are exploring real-time animation we are limited in the number of polygons we can draw in a scene fast enough to provide the illusion of movement. Computers and graphics cards get faster and so this limit rises steadily. Most computers on the market will cope easily with 5000 polygons, 50 times per second. Nevertheless, if you have three characters and a set then 5000 is a difficult limit to work with, rarely allowing more than 1500 polygons per character. Just to model a convincing face will usually take at least 3000 polygons. So how do we work around this limitation. The answer is texture mapping. By applying a carefully produced bitmap to the polygons we can add the illusion of considerably more detail. Figure ...