Creating and applying a normal map

- [Instructor] So first of all let's work on the normal map. To do that, let's go back to Krita. And Krita has a nice tool here under filter and edge detection called height to normal map. And we can generate a pretty good normal map with this. The only problem is that it does this destructively. In other words, it will create the normal map over your existing layers. So, what let's do is let's select these two layers, and I'll right-click. And let's duplicate the layer. Once again, with Control + J. Here we go. So now we have copies of this. I'm going to hide the originals here. And let's merge these two together, so we're only dealing with one layer at a time. So once again, I'll right-click and I'll choose merge with layer below. And there we go. So, now we have just one layer. And I'll change the name of this layer. I'll just call it normal. Okay, so now that we have that, the other two are hidden and we have that selected. Let's come up here to filter, edge detection, and height to normal map. And then you can see what it does. It actually overlays this over the layer. And currently our radius is at 1.0. We can click and drag, and drag this way up, and create some pretty crazy effects, but I don't think we need to do that. I'm just going to click in here and type in two, and hit Enter. So we get 2.0. I think that's probably enough. With that I'll click OK. And we have a normal map. So let's give this a try. I'm going to go to file and export. And I'll call this, instead of UVs, let's call this N-O-R for normal map. I'll save. Hit OK, and let's go back to Blender. Now, for this I'm going to go ahead and open up that other window that we had before. I'm going to click up in the corner and drag down like this. And then I'm going to pull this menu down and go to our shader editor. And here's the node representation of our material. I don't really need this panel once again, so I'll hit the N key. And now, what let's do is, let's go ahead and add a normal map. If we zoom in here we can see that we have a normal socket here. So what we need is another image node that we connect up to this socket. So let's press Shift + A and go to texture, image. And then let's go ahead and click open. And let's browse to our textures and choose palette, normal. I'll click open. Now we need to convert from this yellow socket here, a color map to this blue socket here. We want to tend to keep with the same type of sockets. It's not always necessary, but recommended. I'm going to press Shift + A, and under vector I'm going to bring in a normal map node. I'll click here, drop that. Now we've got the yellow color to the yellow color. And the blue normal to the blue normal. And I don't know if you can see that change, but now we have a little more texture to this. Let me see. If we select the normal map here and press the M key, we can toggle the mute on and off. So I'll hit the M key. And you can see over here in the 3D view the difference. We've got just a little bit of texture being created. You can see it especially along here. See that? Now, we could also increase our strength. If we take the strength up to something like three, you can really see it. But maybe two is good. Let's try that. Yeah, two is pretty good. We can get a pretty good sense of the rough texture of that at a setting of two. Yeah, let's do that. Okay. So now what I'd like to do is lighten the color up just a bit. I want to come up here and, in between the image node and our principle shader, we can insert a curves node that will allow us just to adjust the brightness here a bit. So let's press Shift + A and go to color, RGB curves. And I'm just going to drop this right here, and it'll automatically connect it up. Now, if I click here in the middle, I can add a node, a point here, and if I click on that and drag it this way, it'll brighten it up. If I drag it this way it'll make it pretty dark. So let's just do it a little bit. Let's just bring it up a little bit this way. And lighten this up just a little bit like this. Kind of want it something like that. Maybe like this. There we go. So once again, I could hit the M key, and we can mute that. And you can see the difference. All right. So I think I like it like that. All right, so we've got our palette UV mapped and textured. We've taken a look at using the smart UV project unwrap method instead of marking our seams. And remember, not every object is going to be good for something like smart UV project. This particular object very good for it, because it has a lot of very regular, similar pieces to it. But if you need to place a texture exactly, like a label, or if the object is more organic in shape, then you should probably think about using seams. Well, for our next object, we'll use the dumpster to talk about how we can UV map and organize a more complex object that has many pieces, and different types of textures and materials.