# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Color Map Normal Mapping

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## The Color-Map-Normal

For more advanced Blender users, you probably have at one time or
another wanted to create something very detailed and realistic, only to
realize that one modeled head or one cool building has taken an enormous
amount of memory, and rendering (or worse, animating!) something like
that would probably take days! Well there is an awesome trick you can
use to create intricate details and design shading, with a relatively
low amount of faces. You can use blender to create and apply normal
maps, which are RGB colored maps that can be used as a texture to
calculate how light will bounce of an objects surface. All you need is
blender and photo-editing software to tweak the picture a bit.

## Creating a Normal Map

You can very easily create a normal map once you figure out all the
necessary settings. You can start by either making a high-poly count
version of your object, or making the material that will be applied to
the object to make the normal map.

### High-Poly Version

We will first start by making a simple object with a high-poly count.
Start up blender, and let\'s delete everything there first, then go to
top-view, orthographic, and start by adding a camera.

![](Clear_Blender.jpg "Clear_Blender.jpg"){width="250"}

Next, start with a circle, with a radius of 2 and 32 vertices in
circumference. Keep it filled. Select the edges of the circle, keeping
the inner vertex unselected, and extrude edges only. Scale the new
vertices by 1.1. Repeat this with only the outermost vertices 6 more
times, until you have a ring of 7 vertices and a center vertex. Now, we
will refer to the center vertex as center, the innermost ring as Ring 1,
and the outermost ring as Ring 7. Deselect all vertices, then select all
vertices of ring 2, 4, and 6 (This can easily be done by holding the Alt
and Shift keys, then selecting an edge adjoining two vertices of the
same ring for each ring). With these rings selected, move it 0.4 in the
Z direction. Now, let\'s smooth this bowl out. In the editing index,
under the modifiers tab, add a subsurf modifier of 2, and then apply the
modifier. Then under the links and materials tab, select Set Smooth.
Next after the object looks all nice and smooth, select your Camera and
move it positive in the Z direction so it\'s positioned directly above
the object looking straight down at it, and edit the camera Lens
properties so that it is set to Orthographic, and scale the lens so that
it includes all the bowl and fills up the camera space as much as
possible.

![](Blender_bowl.JPG "Blender_bowl.JPG"){width="250"}

### Creating the Color-Map Material

Now, to be able for the Render to apply the colors on the right areas of
the object. For this, we will start by applying a material the bowl.
Make this material 0.0 on the R, G, and B spectra, and depress the
shadeless button. Now, go to the textures index and add 3 textures to
the material, and set them as \"Blend\" textures with \"Lin\" depressed
(a linear calculation). For these 3 textures, name them something to do
with either \"Red\"/\"Green\"/\"Blue\" or \"X\"/\"Y\"/\"Z\" in that
order, because doing this will ensure you keep the channels in order.
The following image will show _all_ settings that
need to be set to make the material work.

![](3_norms_material.jpg "3_norms_material.jpg")

Now before your Rendering you want to make the World texture to be
completely black, so this way it won\'t interfere when you apply it as a
normal map. Now Render your image, and hit F3 to save. It should come
out to something like this.
![](Ripple_disc_norm.jpg "Ripple_disc_norm.jpg"){width="500"}

As a final note in this subsection, what I suggest doing is deleting the
bowl and saving the file as something like \"BlenderForNormals.blend\"
so if you ever want to make another normal, the area and materials are
already set up and all you need to do is import or create the object.
Just a suggestion.

### Applying as a Normal Map

Well we got the image, now let\'s apply it and make it come out as a low
poly-count texture. So, let\'s continue by deleting the high poly bowl
and instead add a plane in the middle of the camera. Now, apply a
material to the object and make the material hard, soft, rocky, wet, or
however you want it to look. After you\'ve made the plane how you want,
add a texture to the material, and make it an image texture. Load the
image as the texture, depress the normal map button, and set the normal
spacing to object. Now, on the materials index under the Map To tab,
make sure the Col button is relieved and instead depress the Nor button.
Just add a lamp above the plane, and Render! You should now have the
same shading effect as the original bowl, with about 0.01% of the
original faces\--one.

If your Render comes out odd, it may be because the shading is being
applied too heavily. You can alter this by adjusting the Nor slider
directly below the \"Mix\" drop-down menu. O used about 0.2 and it came
out just fine, like this picture.

![](Blender_plus_norm.JPG "Blender_plus_norm.JPG"){width="350"}

***Congratulations, that\'s all there is to normal mapping. It\'s a
simple technique with many great uses!***

