Render Elements: Normals


This time let's do a brief anatomic study of a Normals output variable. Below is my original manuscript of an article first published in issue 188 of a 3D World magazine.

A brief anatomic study of a Normals output variable
A typical Normals element rendered in screen space

Packing Lighting Data into RGB Channels



Most existing renderers process Red, Green and Blue channels independently. While this limits the representation of certain optical phenomena (especially those in the domain of physical rather than geometric optics), it provides some advantages as well. For one, this feature allows encoding lighting information from several sources into a single image separately, which we are going to look at in this article.