What is normal map in tangent space?

Tangent space. Normal vectors in a normal map are expressed in tangent space where normals always point roughly in the positive z direction. Tangent space is a space that’s local to the surface of a triangle: the normals are relative to the local reference frame of the individual triangles.

How do you convert a tangent space to a normal space?

if you have a tangent space normal, the world space normal is: Code: float3 ws_normal = tangent * ts_normal. x + binormal * ts_normal.

What do normal map colors mean?

One of the most valuable maps for a 3D artist is the normal map. Rather than having a color range of black to white, like a bump map uses, normal maps consist of red, green, and blue. These RGB values translates to x, y, and z coordinates, allowing a 2D image to represent depth.

What is World space normal map?

A world space normal map contains normals coordinates relative to a fixed frame in the object space, as opposed to tangent space normals which are relative to per-pixel-varying frames. As an example, a blue pixel corresponds to a (0,0,1) normal. In a world space map, this would indicate the up direction.

What is normal map shader?

Normal mapping allows you to add surface details without adding any geometry. Typically, in a modeling program like Blender, you create a high poly and a low poly version of your mesh. You take the vertex normals from the high poly mesh and bake them into a texture. This texture is the normal map.

What is a normal shader?

See in Glossary. These shaders are the basic shaders in Unity. They are not specialized in any way and should be suitable for most opaque objects. They are not suitable if you want your object to be transparent, emitting light etc.

What is tangent space 3D?

As far as the name goes, tangent space is also known as texture space in some cases. Our 3D world can be split up in to many different coordinate systems. Tangent space is just another such coordinate system, with it’s own origin. This is the coordinate system in which the texture coordinates for a face are specified.

What is tangent 3D?

Tangents are mostly used in bump-mapped Shaders. A tangent is a unit-length vector that follows Mesh surface along horizontal (U) texture direction. Tangents in Unity are represented as Vector4, with x,y,z components defining the vector, and w used to flip the binormal if needed.

Why are normal maps purple?

Normal maps can actually be a wide variety of colors. The blue/purple colors are actually because a normal map is 3D in nature, so each RGB channel is mapped to an X, Y and Z axis. In game engines, the only information that needs to be encoded into the normal map is the axis facing the camera (Z axis).

What is a curvature map?

A curvature map is a texture that stores the convexity/concavity of the mesh. Curvature can be used to mask where the surface would get more wear or where sub-surface scattering might occur (convex), where it might accumulate more dirt (concave), to check for surface continuity, etc.