What is Normal Mapping?
3D models are made up of polygons. The more polygons a model has the more detailed it will look. However, increasing the number of polygons in a model also makes it more complex and the more CPU processing it requires. So that’s where normal maps come into play. At its core, normal mapping revolves around one core concept: surface normals. As discussed in the previous section, normal maps are just texture images where each pixel stores the object’s surface normal vector in the form of RGB colours. Here red channel contains the value of the X axis, the green channel contains the value of the Y axis and the blue channel contains the value of the Z axis. Together, the RGB colour represents the value of the surface normal of that point.
Normal Mapping in Computer Graphics
Computer Graphics has improved a lot in recent years. Nowadays it is much more realistic whether it is animated 3D videos or games. However, rendering such graphics with great detail can be quite hardware-intensive. That’s where normal mapping comes into the picture. It is a technique in computer graphics that uses mathematical computations to create detailed and realistic graphics without using extra polygons. It is a popular method for optimizing the rendering of computer graphics and adding details to it simultaneously. This technique uses something called normal maps which is a 2D image that contains information about the normals of the 3D object. In this article, we will look at what exactly is normal mapping.