What are Normals?

Trailer:

SERIES DESCRIPTION:

In this program agnostic series we learn about Normals and the part they play in our 3D art. By the end of this course you’ll have a deep understanding of Normals with the ability to debug and solve almost any normal map baking scenario.

This 3 hour series consists of 10 chapters:

Chapter 1: Normals - What are they?
We learn about Normals and the role they play in surface construction.

Chapter 2: Normals - What do they do?
We dive into how Normals can be manipulated to alter the look of a surface.

Chapter 3: Projection - How does it work?
We explore how Normals are used to represent complex geometry on flat surfaces.

Chapter 4: Texture Baking Basics.
We finally take a look at baking our high polygon model to a texture. We apply what we’ve learnt thus far to debug and solve almost any projection issue.

Chapter 5: What are Tangent Space Normals?
We build our own tangent space Normals and learn how they work to better understand why they’re used.

Chapter 6: Why your Normal map bakes are warped.
We take a look at why low polygon Normals play a huge part in how high polygon detail is projected onto a surface.

Chapter 7: Baking with support edges.
We take everything we’ve learnt and bake a clean normal map using support edges.

Chapter 8: Baking using Normal map blending.
We take a different approach and blend two normal map projection methods to create a clean map.

Chapters 9 and 10: Baking using Normal map blending in Maya and Blender.
We replicate the normal map blending technique in both Maya and Blender to illustrate these methodologies are program agnostic.

SKILL LEVEL:

This series assumes the viewer has some prior 3D art creation knowledge. As we start from the simplest explanation of Normals, the viewer should have a comprehensive understanding of Normals by the end.

CHAPTER VIDEO FILES:

All videos have been recorded in 2560x1440 at 30 frames per second.

SOURCE FILES:

The series models have been included as .fbx files.