CG Shaders – Detail Normals

Here’s a trick i get asked about a lot : Detail Normals. Detail Normals are a great way to add resolution to a normal map when viewing it up close. Unreal uses this a lot to add detail to their materials and i actually learned this from back in the old days of tearing apart shader networks in UDK. The best part is you can use a fairly low resolution tilable texture and still get decent results by tiling it inside the materialI included an intensity and falloff modifier for the detail normals. While many shaders like this include an intensity adjustment, i think that a falloff is useful for maintaining the shapes of the base normal map. This allows the detail to be most intense in flat areas of the base normals, where they are most needed.This shader is based on the original phong with normals i did earlier