Hardware 3D (C++ DirectX Graphics) Tutorial 34

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Normal mapping is like what texture mapping would be if it actually lived up to its name. Time to learn about tangent space and other such weird things, I guess.

Topics Covered

Part 1

  • Normal mapping motivation / goal
  • Texture alignment
  • RGB encoding of normal vectors

Part 2

  • Translation of object space normal map into view space
  • Refactoring using SOLID principles
    • Single Responsibility Principle
    • Open / Closed Principle
  • Definition and limitations of object space normal mapping

Part 3

  • Tangent Space
  • Extraction of Tangent and Bitangent vectors from vertex data (pos, normal, uv)
  • Synthesis of TBN matrix (tangent space rotation matrix)
  • Fixing the mapping from Green color channel => Z component of normal map vector

Errata

In Part 1, Chili decodes the z component of the normal map by mapping from 0..1 => 0..1 directly, but this mapping is not common, nor is it correct for the map we are using. All channels should be mapped with 0..1 => -1..+1. This will be corrected in Part 3. It is true that the z channel will never be less than zero in a proper (tangent space) normal map, but it does not seem to be common to use this unused range to expand the dynamic range of the z channel encoding.

Video Timestamp Index

Source Code

See also