Normal Mapping

[Martin]

hi,

The idea is that you take all of the detail from the high poly model and put it in a normal map. Then you apply the normal map to the low res model just like you would add a texture map.The characters in the cinematics always look really nice with lots of detail and realism, but as soon as the game play starts again, the model is back to being low poly and very chunky looking. That is the main goal of using normal maps. Now you have a low res model that looks a lot like the high res one. It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good trick that makes low res models look a lot better than they have before. Normal mapping is a bit technical in its approach.

You can reffer on these links for more details,


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_map

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/...g/229.html


Lots of plugins are there for normal mapping. NVDIA is a good one. Here is the link for that

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nv_te...tools.html

Thanks