Can somebody explain to this noob the "Normal map"?

[Martonaut]

So, I finaly start moding, The tutorial from c7 helpd a lot, and I had used blender before (but havent textured till this day), but there is one thing I dont understand, in the video when c7 imports a part, he also imports the texture and the "normal map", I only have a texture, and I dont know how to do a normal map, I Dont even know how it works, do i do it on blender?

if I understand correctly the normal mal helps with the shaders? (all my parts look funky) and it looks just like the texture but in a colored scale, is it done with a design software? :/

well as you can see , i have no idea what the normal map is, how it works, or how to do one, so any help would be nice.

[orson]

Well a few ways you can do it , if its quite a basic pattern your doing then its easy enough to do manually .

Without going too far into into it , lots of tutorials about .. it works by greyscale images initially , white is the highest and scaling down to black as lowest , then you can use either the Gimp plugin (i dont know if it is still supported , looks legit)

http://registry.gimp.org/node/69

or

the photoshop/nvidia one

http://developer.nvidia.com/content/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop

[Sava]

Since you're just starting modeling I wouldn't worry about normal maps too much because they are non-essential to make and ksp has a bug related to normal maps anyways. As simple as I can put it if you're into physics a "normal vector" is a line perpendicular to a surface. What a normal map does is trick the computer into thinking that the normals of a model are more complex then they really are making the lighting react differently then if it did not have a normal map. If you're completely new to computer graphics i wouldn't worry about this at all as you pick this stuff up as you go.

[Martonaut]

ty for the replays, Now I understand them a bit more and the tools are nice aswell, I probably will let them for the last, since my textures and models need more work before trying to figure out better lightning for them.