What are Normals?

What you’ll learn:
We learn about Normals and the role they play in surface construction.
We dive into how Normals can be manipulated to alter the look of a surface.
We explore how Normals are used to represent complex geometry on flat surfaces.
We take a look at why low polygon Normals play a huge part in how high polygon detail is projected onto a surface.

Requirements:
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.

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.

Who this course is for:
Beginner/intermediate