Celestia Forums

No, this is not about a battle between Pokemon (Oh gods, my daughter is corrupting me lol).

I was wondering what the advantage of using a normalmap is over using a straight grey-scale bumpmap? I've tried both with no discernable differences in eventual render quality.

I hope some nice person will enlighten me, cos I'm sure there's a good reason.

btw: Don Edwards, love the texture maps. Lovely work

There is one way to be definitely convinced : using the AltSurface, you define one texture with normalmap and one with bumpmap.

You rotate the Earth, you look at coasts, at montains, at islands, at lakes, and... you delete immediatly the bump texture, because you understand it wastes of space on your HD

I think NormalMap is an incredibly advance for Celestia. The effects are truly amazing !