koobas.hobune.stream
What normal means?
Hello! I been using Unity for a year now, a term that i occasionally hear about is (normal / normalized etc) I've googled this and i still have low idea of what does normal means? can someone explain this to me?
Depends on the context of the use of the word.
In 3D geometry, "Normal" is the direction (vector) that is exactly perpendicular of a flat face of geometry. For most 3D geometry, this vector faces out from the volume of the geometry and is used for calculating a shader's response to color, light, shadow, reflection etc.
"Normalized" is actually a little different. This is the idea that any range of values can be "normalized" to a range of zero to one (0.0 - 1.0). This is important for lots of shader and other interaction calculations in an environment when the ACTUAL values stored in variables can vary due to bit depth. For example, a JPG image is 8bit, so "black" is zero, and "white" is 255. But a TGA image might be 16 bit, where black is zero, but white is 65535. Some shader calculations involve multiplying values from two different images together, if these two different images where both white, 255 x 65535 results in a different value than multiplying two 8bit values (255 x 255), so "normalizing" the values (8bit compresses all possible values zero->255 into 256 steps from 0.0 to 1.0 / 16 bit values compresses the range of zero -> 65535 to 0.0 to 1.0)..... then you always get 1.0 x 1.0 ..... a predictable result regardless of the source data.
Hope this helps. Have fun.
