Quote Originally Posted by Imoen View Post
Threw together a quick visual example... hopefully this helps people understand a little bit.

-This is a very quick rough example.

- I chose to use a flat plane as the low poly... because it better shows what a normal map does visually. It adds bump information the lighting can react to on the low poly. This gives the "appearance" of more detail than the low poly actually has.

The purple map is the "Normal map" forgot to put that in there.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/18215724/normal_example.jpg
Great example. even knowing what it does, I'm always shocked at how powerful normal maps can be.