Normal Maps in BLENDER - Instant Realism to Materials

hey everybody this tutorial is all about normal maps in blender and as usual it'll be straight to the point we'll cover what normal maps are and how to use them in blender we will not be covering baking or creating our own normal maps my name is brandon let's get started normal maps in 3d software are used to simulate a certain amount of bumpiness on a material without needing any extra geometry they are extremely effective for adding bumps dents scratches cracks and crevices especially if the object is going to be a little bit further away from the camera here's a plane with no normal map here it is with a normal map added this is just a simple plane with only four vertices but the normal map has faked a lot of extra detail if you've ever purchased or downloaded a pbr material you've probably noticed a purple colored image file that came with it these are normal maps and can be used in eevee or in cycles what is a normal by the way every face edge and vertex in 3d software has a direction that it faces and that direction is called a normal the normal affects how light interacts with a surface on a per pixel basis normal maps tell the rendering program to adjust the normals of a surface therefore adjusting how the light interacts with the geometry the way normal mapping works isn't completely necessary to understand but it's interesting and it's kind of genius the shading information for normal maps that determine how light interacts with an assigned object needs x y and z vector information unlike a bump map which only uses vertical information mapped as a black and white image basically normal maps need some three-dimensional data to tell the camera how this flat surface is supposed to interact with light to fake all of this detail that isn't actually here to communicate that with the 3d software program the x y and z vector information is coded as red green and blue better known as rgb data and it's saved in a simple color image file this is incredibly efficient and the purplish map is the result of the mixture of these three colors just as an experiment i painted a purely red green and blue area onto an image and plugged it into the normal map of this plane you can see that each color causes light to interact with the surface a little differently the multi-color normal map is just a very complicated use of these three colors and their effects okay so enough with the boring technical stuff if we are in blender and we have a normal map how do we actually use it when we purchase or download a pbr material we get several images which are each different types of maps which we can use for a material the color map the roughness map bump displacement map etc i cover this in a lot of detail in my pbr materials tutorial we are of course going to do everything in the shader editor usually we're using the principled bsdf shader which has a bunch of inputs that different maps can be plugged into and one of them is called the normal input normally no pun intended we plug the color map into the base color the roughness map into the roughness on down the line as covered in my pbr tutorial these are all image texture nodes with the maps loaded in as the images when we get to the normal map we need to do two things we need to make sure the color space has changed from the default srgb to non-color this is so blender knows that even though this image the normal map has color in it its color is not meant to be contributing to the actual color of the material and this is instead being used as data then because we can't plug a yellow color output into a purple normal input we need to convert the data from this color file into something the normal input will understand we do this with a node created specifically for this purpose and it is called the normal map node hey sorry but real quick i love making these videos but youtube pays me like nothing for them there are three ways you can help out if you feel inclined the first is by clicking that thanks button right below the video and tipping me a buck or two the second is down in the description i have links to my favorite add-ons and other blender stuff purchasing through those links throws me a commission at no cost to you the third is to check out my amazon storefront look at my recommended products if you buy something amazon throws me a little referral not sure if i'm supposed to say this but if you use the link and actually buy anything from amazon i still get a referral just saying thanks sorry back to the video press shift a to add a node it can be found under the vector category drop this node in between the image texture containing the normal map and the principled bsdf shader now this converts the color information denoted by a yellow socket over here into the vector information needed by this purple socket here so this is the material without the normal map and this is the material with the normal map at the default strength of one this isn't quite as realistic as a displacement map would be but it's using zero new geometry so it's not increasing render times or memory use very much at all this would be more than enough detail for background objects in a scene i'm going to just mute all these other nodes so we can look at what the normal map is doing by itself we do that by the way by selecting a node and pressing m to mute it we can press m to unmute it when we're done we can see that the normal map and blender is faking the look of a lot of depth and bump and all that good stuff increasing the strength setting on the normal map node can really increase this effect this is one area where we will start to notice a difference depending on if we are using cycles or ev everything i've done so far has been in cycles but would have worked the same in eevee but when we crank the normal strength up really high in ev it starts to look kind of flat because eevee just does not have the detail in lighting that cycles does so you can only get so much benefit from this in evie but in cycles higher strength values look way way better at least in my humble opinion one last thing to note is that if we are going to adjust the location or scale of our material we'll need to map all of the maps together into the same mapping node which would have a texture coordinate plugged into it again all of this is covered in my two-part material tutorial which i highly recommend for beginners and i will link to in the description normal mapping in blender is a great tool please give the video a like consider subscribing and see brandonsdrawings.com normal maps for more information on the topic stay creative

Channel: Brandon's Drawings

Views: 39,652

Keywords: blender normal map, normal map, blender normal mapping, blender tutorial, blender 3d, blender normals, how to use a normal map in blender, what is a normal map, what is a normal map blender, blender what are normals, blender normal material, blender material normal map, blender principled bsdf normal map, blender bump map, blender normal map node, normal maps in blender, blender 3.2 normal maps, blender 3.2 tutorial, blender material tutorial, blender material shading, 2022

Id: WJZTI3SSVBU

Length: 5min 58sec (358 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2022