XNormal--free program for elaborate bump mapping

lewiswadsworth

For various reasons I was researching bump maps and I discovered this free progam:

http://www.xnormal.net/Default.aspx

As far as I can tell, this program allows you to create a "normal map" (which is a kind of elaborated bump map) from an existing, textured and mapped 3D model in various formats.

Here's the full explanation of what a "normal map" does:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_map

The idea, with particular relevance to gaming and animation where you need to have both detail and a low-polygon count, is that you can basically apply the normal map made from the high-polygon-count model to a lower-polygon model and largely maintain the appearance of high-count detail in renderings and animations made using that lower-count model.

Now, this is not going to work in SketchUp, but you could output your SketchUp model in some format xNormal will take, create the normal map, and then in some other program reduce the polygon count of the model and apply that normal map to make your animations faster to render. I noticed while going through the most recent update of Blender that it has the ability to apply normal maps to meshes, and I'm sure things like Max and Maya can as well.

It will be weeks before I have the time to try this out, and I frankly don't get a lot of calls to produce animations. So I thought I would throw this out in the hope that someone will have a chance to do something neat with it and presumably show us.