Normal maping

I came accross this very cool concept on a Unity video @ Lynda's course. The idea is to record surface detail of an object by taking the surface normals on an image using RGB to represent the normal vector components in each pixel.
Then we can degrade the mesh but use the normal map of the detailed version on the degraded mesh. Of course the lights must nknow how to deal with this geometrically flat surface containing detailed information on the relief. Very cool!

Because most of the surfaces will have normal normals (pointing out of the surface, a big part of the normal maps will be kind of blue, i.e. flat.

Normal mapping is a kind of Bump mapping. We can also record elevation coordinates. With these we can really deform the surface or we can use the surface topograpfy just for interaction with light.

Wikipedia for normal mapping
Wikipedia for bump mapping
Unity for normal mapping, very complete!