There's several approaches to making normal m...

March 07, 2005 by Adam in NWN2

There's several approaches to making normal mapped models. The typical approach used in Doom 3 (and most games, I imagine) is to take a high resolution model and "project" it to a low resolution model. In theory that makes it look about the same but without using so many video-card taxing polygons.

I spent a few hours yesterday playing around with the concept and never got it looking the way I wanted. On the right is a render of the high-resolution model. On the left is the low-resolution with a normal map. If you look closely, it has weird artifacts and bumps not present in the original model. I may still try fiddling with that approach, but I may set it aside for the moment.

Most of my productive work has been creating normal maps for fairly flat surfaces. The Photoshop method is very fast and produces a good result in those cases.