Hello dear Blender Forum
I am wondering if normal baking plays a rule in modeling and rendering for stills or if it is only for game engine purposes. Are baked normal maps good for animated characters?
Thx
kub
Normal maps are desireable. While heavily used in game development, in animations they are quite handy to speed up render times for hobby users.
A pro user or movie company doesn´t care, they got the money to buy the time in a renderfarm or host one themself.
However for rendering animations “at home” its nice to reduce geometry with normal maps. For stills, I´d not use them I guess only in certain areas. Normal maps are easy to spot unless they use paralax mapping.
Well, this cleared out quite a bit what I was looking for and, of course threw a new question: Parallax mapping? Seems for me a game thing?
Dankeschön
kub
Parallax mapping is the next step in normal mapping a kind of a virtual displacement mapping. And it is idd. more a game thing, although you can also use it in animations, however it is only perceived in movement, you can´t really see parallax mapping in a still ^^
I think the best description is on wikipedia’s article on Parallax mapping
Parallax mapping is implemented by displacing the texture coordinates at a point on the rendered polygon by a function of the view angle in tangent space (the angle relative to the surface normal) and the value of the height map at that point. At steeper view-angles, the texture coordinates are displaced more, giving the illusion of depth due to parallax effects as the view changes.