On the right, is a high poly sculpted mesh. Here’s an example of a normal map in action: On the left is a low poly base mesh. The background blueish color is just the mesh with default normals and lighting, then, depending on where a particular part of a mesh is being lit from, the other colors represent light coming from the top/bottom/left/right. Here’s an example of what a “Standard” normal map looks like, which is what we will first be creating. This allows for infinitely more detailed lighting versus just the basic mesh alone – you can create a mesh with literally millions of polygons, bake the normal from that high poly mesh to an image, and then apply it to a mesh that may only need to be a couple hundred polygons - while still maintaining the lighting from high poly mesh. The normal length, and the direction it is pointing control how much light, and from where, gets captured to light your mesh.Ī normal map, however, assigns a normal to every individual pixel of the texture on your object, not just each vertex of the mesh. On a technical level, each vertex in a mesh has a “normal” – kind of like an imaginary line reaching out and collecting light. What is a Normal Map?Ī normal map, in simple terms, is a type of image that basically allows you to copy the lighting from a high-poly mesh, down to a low-poly mesh. These stand-alone programs are not covered in this tutorial. There are also multiple other external programs that can be used to create texture-based normals, such as xNormal and ShaderMap. Blender is freely available to everyone, and although Photoshop isn’t, the image editing we’re going to do can actually be done in any program that supports the ability to individually access and edit channels. a mesh bake and a texture-based normal map)įirst things first, I will be using Blender3D (Version 2.72) and Photoshop (I’m using CC) for the entirety of this tutorial. There are multiple different methods of creating and working with normal maps:Ĭombining Multiple Normal Maps (E.G. information along the way as deemed helpful, a section about texture-based normal maps, as well as some information about touching up normal maps and hand-painting them. (Most commonly, in the sims world, for things like flowing fabric and cloth wrinkles.) There will be some misc.
Zoom in blender on mac how to#
In this guide, I am going to be going through the process of showing you how to create a normal map in Blender 3D – for both hard surface details (for something like screws or grooves) and sculpted organic shapes.
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