Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the reply. Yes - later - after sending this mail and some
discussion at the IRC - the conclusion arrived at is that Normal
Maps, as you said, are glorified bump maps, but the difference is
Bump maps use greyscale to generate the bump levels while Normal maps
use RGB. I must try and investigate the XNORMAL app in between
Blender/Silo and Realsoft. What Xnormal seems to do is create one of
these Normal maps by taking two obj versions of the mesh. A low poly
version and the high poly version. From these it creates a normal
map. As to how this works or understanding same - me dont understand yet :)
So again - why is this all of interest? The above is used
considerably in the gaming industry it seems. AND for RS at the
moment which [ I think ] has problems shifting large poly counts, its
a way of getting sculpted models into an RS scene with low overhead.
AND for free as both Xnormal and Blender ARE Free.
Cheers
Aidan
At 05:37 05/06/2007, you wrote:
I'm no guru on this, but a normal map is a texture that defines a
surface normal via color.
A surface normal is the vector (a three dimensional direction) that
points away from a surface. In rendering you use this vector to
evaluate how much light any given area on an object reflects, and in
which direction. By mapping a normal map to a surface you can
artificially influence these normal vectors, and thus give an object a
lot more detail in the rendering phase, that is not really there in
geometry. Thus it renders fairly quickly, too. I may be wrong on this,
but to me a normal map is a shortcut from a displacement map, since
the later must be evaluated to generate normals, while the first
already defines them by itself...
hope that helped explain this technology some more.
Daniel
On 6/4/07, Aidan O Driscoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
AND - Just came across this:
http://sv3.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=77037
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