what the different between bent normal and normal ?

[KLONOA WORKS]

Hi ,

in Ultimapper there are two type :

-Normal in Tangent Space.
&
-Bent Normal in Tangent Space.


can someone explain what the different ?

and which one is use for games ?

[grahamef]

They are used for completely different things. Normals are the vectors that are perpendicular to the geometry's tangent, and bent normals are an acceleration technique for ambient occlusion calculations. Bent normals are the average of the unoccluded rays cast when calculating AO.

Just about any game engine uses normal maps. As for bent normals, that depends on which engine it is and whether/how it's been set up for AO.