Normal maps?

[orclord]

What are normal maps, what do they do?

[corsebou]

erm....

jut know control +n or control + shift + n to calculate normal inside/outside in edit mode.

i thik normales are a mathematike stuffs...

they need to be recalclate for example when you UV map the texture on a face, sometimesit will be on the back of it! but you neeed it in front!
so yu have to go in edit mode, select all vectrices and recalculate the normales inside or outside.
not really ot of infos but hope that help!

[Heavily Tessellated]

Blender Manual Part IV: Bump and Normal Maps (http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartIV/Bump_and_Normal_Maps)

[orclord]

I knew someone was going to put that. I don't understand what they are talking about

[blazer003]

Ok, normal maps, also called bump maps are (usually) black and white images. The darker parts of the images are used to simulate grooves, and the lighter areas are used to simulate raised bumps. However normal maps only affect the light that bounces off the object. It won't actually make a bump that you can see in the geometry.

It may be kind of hard to understand what I wrote, but here is an image where you can see what a bump map does.
Before bump map
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/1377/nobump5ng.jpg

After Bump Maphttp://img522.imageshack.us/img522/3944/bump9ee.jpg

And here is a picture of the actual bump map. Hopefully this will help you along enough that you can start to understand some of those tutorials better.

http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/632/bumpmap3tr.jpg (http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/632/bumpmap3tr.jpg)

[guardianelm]

Normal maps are a bit like bump maps with the direction of bumping encoded in the color of the bitmap.

The normal of a location is used to determine how light reflects off of it, and if you apply the appropriate normal map, you can make a flat surface appear to have monkey faces coming out of it when rendered within reasonable angles, but still be flat when editting.