The Normals shading model enables you to add a normal map, which incorporates surface detail into 3D models without increasing the polygon count. By altering the way light interacts with the surface, it creates the illusion of bumps, grooves, and fine details such as fabric texture, engraved patterns, or pores in skin.
Normal maps use an RGB texture, where each channel encodes a surface direction (X, Y, and Z). This information modifies shading, giving the impression of geometric complexity. Normal maps can be created in several ways:
- Bake Projects in Toolbag: Generate normal maps from a high-poly source model.
- Texture Projects in Toolbag: Paint or generate detail directly.
- Third-Party Applications: Author maps in external tools such as Substance Painter, Photoshop plugins, or other texture generators.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Texture Slot | Add a normal map texture by clicking on the slot or dragging and dropping one from the Library. |
| Scale & Bias | Remaps vector data from the range [0,1] to [-1,1]. Disable this setting with floating-point textures. |
| Flip X, Y, Z | Inverts the content in the X, Y, Z axis or red channel of the texture. It can be useful if your texture map uses a different coordinate system. |
| Generate Z | Generates the normal’s Z coordinate from X and Y. This is generally useful for two-channel normal maps |
| Object Space | Determines whether the input normal map was baked in tangent or object/world space. Lighting errors will be seen if object space is enabled when using a tangent space map and vice versa. |
