Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 19
Normal Maps
What Normal Maps Do
Pretty much everyone in our industry has heard the buzz-
words “normal mapping.” This technology has actually been
around for quite a while, but it is just now making it into the
real-time rendering scene. By now most digital artists and
gamers have seen the results of normal mapping in real time,
such as in the real-time rendering engine used by
Doom 3
, one
of the first big titles to use this technique.
A normal map is a separate texture from all of your other
textures. This “map,” or texture, captures detail from a much
higher detail model and saves it. Using this technique we can
create environments and characters that are hugely detailed
yet appear no different than their higher polycount counter-
parts. This is all for the purpose of rendering much faster than
you ultimately could with the high-detail version of your
model.
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