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Mastering SFML Game Development

You're reading from   Mastering SFML Game Development Inject new life and light into your old SFML projects by advancing to the next level.

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781786469885
Length 442 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Raimondas Pupius Raimondas Pupius
Author Profile Icon Raimondas Pupius
Raimondas Pupius
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Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Under the Hood - Setting up the Backend FREE CHAPTER 2. Its Game Time! - Designing the Project 3. Make It Rain! - Building a Particle System 4. Have Thy Gear Ready - Building Game Tools 5. Filling the Tool Belt - a few More Gadgets 6. Adding Some Finishing Touches - Using Shaders 7. One Step Forward, One Level Down - OpenGL Basics 8. Let There Be Light - An Introduction to Advanced Lighting 9. The Speed of Dark - Lighting and Shadows 10. A Chapter You Shouldnt Skip - Final Optimizations

Normal maps


Lighting can be used to create visually complex and breath taking scenes. One of the massive benefits of having a lighting system is the ability it provides to add extra details to your scene, which wouldn't have been possible otherwise. One way of doing so is using normal maps.

Mathematically speaking, the word normal in the context of a surface is simply a directional vector that is perpendicular to said surface. Consider the following illustration:

In this case, what's normal is facing up because that's the direction perpendicular to the plane. How is this helpful? Well, imagine you have a really complex model with many vertices; it'd be extremely taxing to render said model because of all the geometry that would need to be processed with each frame. A clever trick to work around this, known as normal mapping, is to take the information of all of those vertices and save them on a texture that looks similar to this one:

It probably looks extremely funky, especially if being looked...

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