Customizing Normals - 9: How Tangent Normal Mapping works

I will attempt to explain how Tangent Normal Mapping works in common terms and with plenty of visual examples. Normal mapping is one of the most powerful tools we have for achieving high quality custom normals. But it is difficult to use because it requires complete understanding to get it to do what we want. And it is hard to find a good explanation in terms artists will understand. So I shall attempt to make the explanation I wish I'd had when I was learning it!

This video will attempt to explain how it all works. It will be mostly theory. The next video will be the practical application.

Topics:
- What Object Normals maps are
- What Tangent Normal maps are
- What a Tangent is
- What a UV tangent is and why we need them
- Creating Normal Maps without using the Bake system
- Making a custom Normal Mapping group that allows arbitrary Normals
- How to compute UV Tangents in Geometry Nodes

Blog posts for this series. Updates will be here!
https://www.aversionofreality.com/blo...#9
http://www.aversionofreality.com/blog...

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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
02:33 - 1: Object Space Normal Maps
04:39 - Color Space issues
05:35 - Remapping Range
06:47 - Object vs World space
10:31 - Texture bits
12:52 - Object Normals and Deforms
14:37 - Advantages of Normals as pixels
17:45 - The regular bake system is terrible
20:28 - 2: What a Tangent Map stores
25:56 - Getting the tangent space difference
28:56 - Rendering Normal maps without Baking
30:35 - 3: What is a Tangent?
34:40 - Exactly what a tangent space difference is
37:30 - Normal Mapping node group
41:25 - 4: What can be used as a Tangent?
44:43 - 5: Getting Surface Tangents
49:18 - Visualizing Surface Tangents with GeoNodes
52:27 - 6: UV Tangents
56:31 - 7: Custom Tangents
01:01:54 - Tangents and Blender's Custom Normals
01:05:37 - 8: Deformation Issues
01:10:08 - Baked Subsurf
01:13:18 - 9: UV Tangents in GeoNodes
01:23:47 - Tangent Sign aka W
01:27:08 - GeoNodes TBN viewer group
01:28:10 - Outro