This 3-hour course explores the fundamentals of 3D normals and their role in surface construction and texture baking. The series covers how normals can be manipulated to alter surface appearance, how complex geometry is projected onto flat surfaces, and the mechanics of tangent space normals. It addresses common baking issues, such as warped projections, and explains how low-polygon normals influence high-polygon detail projection.

The instruction includes practical texture baking workflows, demonstrating techniques like baking with support edges and normal map blending to create clean normal maps. While the core concepts are program-agnostic, the final chapters provide specific demonstrations of normal map blending techniques using both Blender and Maya. Source models are included in FBX format.