For the past month, I have been learning on my own and writing a little graphics library and am currently working on the transformation of vertex normals to soon support lighting/shading. I understand how if I transform the vertices by a matrix M that I need to apply the inverse-transpose of M (i.e., (M^-1 )^T ) to the surface normals. However, I am struggling to understand how this rule can be applied to all of the basic transformations (translate, scale, rotate) ... particularly, translation.Using a homogeneous (w) coordinate in a 4D vector class, a Translate(x, y, z) would have no effect on a normal since its w-coordinate is 0, indicating that it is a vector, not a point. However, when we transpose the inverse of the Translate then it would have an effect on the normal (which feels incorrect). For example, let's say that we have created a 3D triangle and want to apply a basic Translate(1, 2, 3) to the three vertices' positions. Based upon the rule for transforming vertex normals (i.e., inverse-transpose), we should be multiplying the three vertices' normals by Transpose(Translate(-1, -2, -3)). However, this feels incorrect since a vertex normal should remain unaffected by Translation and only be affected by Rotation and Scaling. Any help in understanding how the inverse-transpose can be applied to vertex normals would be greatly appreciated!
Inverse-Transpose of Vertex Normals
3d;transformations;matrices;normal mapping