Theory

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1. What is a normal

1 - What is a normal

Contributed by Luis E. Collado.

A normal or surface normal to be exact is a perpendicular vector to a surface. It is used by blender software to determine among other things, how light will interact with an object ( which is a collection of surfaces ). You can see what I mean by starting up blender, going into the Edit Buttons and pushing in the "draw Normals" button, then by changing the NSize Button to .8, now if you enter edit mode you will notice a small blue line in the center of the plane. This is the normal to this surface. Get rid of the plane and create an ico sphere. ->mesh->icosphere take the default values. Enter edit mode and you will see each normal associated with each surface on the sphere.

I hope this helps,

Luis

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