3DMotive – Intro To Normal Maps

In Intro to Normal Maps, Warren Marshall will be providing a crash course on normal maps and walking you through the technical know-how to fix commonly encountered errors in your normal maps. Knowing what’s going on under the hood will make you a better artist because you’ll not just be able to fix errors, but you’ll understand why those errors are happening, which is a much stronger position to be in. During this course he’ll start at the fundamentals and work our way up to advanced trouble shooting techniques. This will include covering topics such as: What a Normal Is, What a Normal Map Is, What Normal Maps Do and Don’t Do, What Causes Seams, and various baking related topics to name a few. We won’t cover specific applications or workflows because the idea here is to give you the core knowledge of what a normal map is – specifically, what it’s doing for you and what it’s not doing for you. Near the end, he’ll talk about how to avoid projection error when baking your normal maps and he’ll be showing you an easy way to add details to your high poly mesh in the form of floaters. Lots of great introductory content here, so don’t miss out!