About 'Normal Maps'!

[Bob_Troppo]

Here is my material study, normal maps are so cool. Yet another tool to quickly add detail to a scene

Now this image looks like the normals are inverted, looks super weird, but I changed the position of the sun lamp (first I was fiddling with inverting the normal) but I was confused as to why it appears correct on suzzane, both spheres, and the torus, I think it was just a lighting issue.

So heres the second image with the only difference being the position of the sun lamp

[bmartin]

Went for normal map-only as well (as that is how I understood the challenge ). But I admit that the combination of “a bit of” displacement + normal maps would be the optimal approach for crowded scenes - seeing how fast 32 GB of memory can get sucked up by Blender using high levels of displacement

What I found interesting is how “bad” pure normal maps look with Cycles. In this case Eevee is way more crispy.

Eevee:

Cycles:

[atashev]

[smackadoosh]

[lLewis]

[Bathinjan]

huge improvement with normals!