12 Facts About Cube mapping

In computer graphics, cube mapping is a method of environment mapping that uses the six faces of a cube as the map shape.

Also, cube mapping provides a much larger capacity to support real-time rendering of reflections relative to sphere mapping because the combination of inefficiency and viewpoint dependency severely limits the ability of sphere mapping to be applied when there is a consistently changing viewpoint.

Cube mapping was first proposed in 1986 by Ned Greene in his paper “Environment Mapping and Other Applications of World Projections”, ten years after environment mapping was first put forward by Jim Blinn and Martin Newell.

Cube mapping is preferred over other methods of environment mapping because of its relative simplicity.

Also, cube mapping produces results that are similar to those obtained by ray tracing, but is much more computationally efficient – the moderate reduction in quality is compensated for by large gains in efficiency.

Sphere Cube mapping is view-dependent, meaning that a different texture is necessary for each viewpoint.

Paraboloid Cube mapping provides some improvement on the limitations of sphere Cube mapping, however it requires two rendering passes in addition to special image warping operations and more involved computation.

Conversely, cube mapping requires only a single render pass, and due to its simple nature, is very easy for developers to comprehend and generate.

Also, cube mapping uses the entire resolution of the texture image, compared to sphere and paraboloid mappings, which allows it to use lower resolution images to achieve the same quality.

Cube mapping maps provide a fairly straightforward and efficient solution to rendering stable specular highlights.

Basic environment mapping uses a static cube map - although the object can be moved and distorted, the reflected environment stays consistent.

Mark VandeWettering took M C Escher's famous self-portrait Hand with Reflecting Sphere and reversed the mapping to obtain these cube map images: left, right, up, down, back, front.