DirectX 11 – Normal Mapping

In this post, we are going to talk about a technique called normal mapping.

When we apply a brick texture to a cone-shaped column, the specular highlights look unnaturally smooth compared to the bumpiness of the brick texture. This is because the underlying mesh geometry is smooth, and we have merely applied the image of bumpy bricks over the smooth cylindrical surface. However, the lighting calculations are performed based on the mesh geometry (in particular the interpolated vertex normals), and not the texture image. Thus the lighting is not completely consistent with the texture.

The strategy of normal mapping is to texture our polygons with normal maps. We then have per-pixel normals which capture the fine details of a surface like bumps, scratches, and crevices. We then use these per-pixel normals from the normal map in our lighting calculations, instead of the interpolated vertex normal.

A normal map is a texture, but instead of storing RGB data at each texel, we store a compressed x-coordinate, y-coordinate, and z-coordinate in the red component, green component, and blue component, respectively. These coordinates define a normal vector, thus a normal map stores a normal vector at each pixel.

To generate normal maps we can use a NVIDIA Photoshop Plugin or CrazyBump software.

The coordinates of the normals in a normal map are relative to the texture space coordinate system. Consequently, to do lighting calculations, we need to transform the normal from the texture space to the world space so that the lights and normals are in the same coordinate system. The TBN bases (Tangent, Bitangent, Normal) built at each vertex facilitate the transformation from texture space to world space.