![]() Game artists tend to obsess over normal maps, and with good reason. In this radio asset, I created the small speaker holes by scaling and transforming many copies of a circular gradient in Substance Designer. I’ve used images of feathers to create the normal map for the bird character.Īlternatively, normal map data can be generated procedurally, meaning that a small amount of data can be mathematically extrapolated into a more complex pattern. Normal map data that’s generated can come from a photograph: a tool like Substance Designer from Allegorithmic is capable of calculating normal information from a photograph of a relatively planar surface. ![]() Personally, this is the technique that I prefer to use in my own work, because it’s less work if I only have to model the low-poly mesh. This allowed the frog to have more detailed highlights and shadows, and also allowed us to include details like bumps on the frog’s back, without actually including that as geometry in the low-poly mesh.ĭata in normal maps can also be generated without a high polygon model. Finally, we applied the resulting normal map onto a low-poly mesh that had appropriate polygonal resolution for a real-time game environment. We first modeled the frog in high-poly detail and then baked the normals in Allegorithmic Substance Designer. Here, we created several premade assets, including a frog character. Baking MapsĪlmost every 3D modeling application, such as Maya LT or 3Ds Max, includes the ability to bake the geometric normals from a high-poly mesh and then reproject them onto a low-poly mesh as bitmapped normals. However, all of them can be categorized as baking or generative. 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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