An Angel with Generated Normals

Sometimes the 3D models we have to display provide no information other than vertex data for the triangles they define.

This might be enough to approximate the shape of the object, but having no normal data, we are severely limited if we want to apply realistic lighting on the object’s surface. Without lighting and textures, it’s very hard to depict the 3D shape of objects.

To help solve this problem, Vortex now provides a simple Normal generation algorithm that “deduces” smooth per-vertex normals from the geometric configuration of the 3D model. The results are nothing short of astonishing.

Normal generation does come at a cost, however. The 3D model depicted in the figures above is composed of 237,018 vertices shared among 474,048 triangles.

In order to produce smooth normals, the generation algorithm must study the triangle adjacency for every vertex and produce exactly one normal for every one.

On the machine the algorithm was developed, a Core 2 Duo @ 2.66 GHz with 4GB of RAM and for the Angel model, this process takes about 841.334 seconds, that is about 14 minutes!

The good news is that given a model, its Normals only need to be generated once. Once the application has the normal data, it can cache it and reuse it every time the model is to be added to a scene, avoiding the computation time altogether.

This gives the developer the opportunity to generate all Normal data offline and then having it attached to the model at runtime.

The Angel model was downloaded from: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/projects/large_models/angel.html