Happy with the bumpiness on your objects? If you look carefully I bet they’ll be a bit bland and when you compare the quality versus a normal map… well you’ll see. But wait, what is a normal map? Why would I want to use one, but isn’t a normal map just like a bump map?

Let’s start with the last statement, yes. Still scratching your head? Well, simply put normal maps and bump maps are cheats to cheaply (render time reference) mimic bumps in the surface without geometry. To gain the utmost realism, displacement maps are the way to go but we’ll save that for another discussion.

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