There’s a fairly large number of tools and workflows for generating normal maps, and that’s probably because normal maps sit at the intersection of modeling and texturing. Offloading heavy geometric detail into a normal map allows 3D models to render quickly while still retaining much of the same detail. More polygons mean more memory, more surfaces to shade, and more things to draw and calculate. This is a very useful trick in real-time computer graphics – namely, games – because generally the more polygons that are on screen at once, the slower a game will run. Rather, the individual pixels of the bitmapped image add surface normals are included in lighting calculations, resulting in the highlights and shadows that would be present if there were more geometry without actually adding any geometry. I say faking, because, a normal map does not add any real geometry. The RGB color channels (red, green, and blue) in a normal map correspond to the respective X, Y, and Z coordinates of surface normals. While normal maps cannot represent deep extrusions and wildly irregular geometry, they are capable of faking small indents and bumps along a flat plane. The result is a much smoother representation of a sphere, while still using the exact same geometry as the flat shaded example.Įven though normal maps are 2D images, they are capable of storing limited 3D information. This sphere is an example of Phong shading, where lighting is calculated based on the normals of each vertex (rather than each face).
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