Animating with Blender

Normal Mapping for Greater Detail at Lower Resolutions

Even if you need to have fine details in your model, you can often get away with using a lower resolution model and the help of a normal map. A normal map changes the way the renderer draws surfaces. It can give the illusion of a much higher level of mesh detail than actually exists. Blender allows you to have two versions of a model, one with a resolution useful for animation and fast rendering and one with very high resolution that contains carefully sculpted details. The high resolution details are baked into a normal map, which is then applied to the normal resolution model. Although the technique was not used in The Beast, we’ll demonstrate the feature with model of the baby.

Let’s ...