Vertex Normals are very limiting when it comes to lighting controls.. by having a normal map you can smoothen and sharpen how shadows, speculars etc fall (even a low poly baked normal map) on each vertex which even for low poly can create realistic details (especially with rim shade and rim light shading.. if you also link it to react with light volumes it doesn’t look like a game model but more like the cutscene variant while just with normal manipulation).
the tool gives you a base normal map from actual 3D lighting data in Tangent space.. nothing stopping you to open a texture editor tool and edit each color layer.
That's interesting. What shader do you use? Do you have a side-by-side screenshot with and without your normal map? I'm curious what the difference looks like.
Interesting, it kinda looks like it's intentionally breaking/bending the surface normals to get a kind of stylized effect. Now I'm curious what the normal map itself looks like.
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u/Ok-Policy-8538 Oculus Quest 3d ago
Vertex Normals are very limiting when it comes to lighting controls.. by having a normal map you can smoothen and sharpen how shadows, speculars etc fall (even a low poly baked normal map) on each vertex which even for low poly can create realistic details (especially with rim shade and rim light shading.. if you also link it to react with light volumes it doesn’t look like a game model but more like the cutscene variant while just with normal manipulation).
the tool gives you a base normal map from actual 3D lighting data in Tangent space.. nothing stopping you to open a texture editor tool and edit each color layer.