In case you're wondering, I paint the normals myself, that's a thing you can do when you know how they work ;) pic.twitter.com/FAi6EHe9EP
— SLENDER WOMAN (@S0phieH) March 2, 2014
The indie developer Sophie Houlden has posted a great visual explanation of what "normals" are, within a 3D video game art context. Full explanation is after the jump:
(And as far as I know: they're called "normals" because of the vector math we do to derive their values -- "normalization" is the process of standardizing a vector so that it is exactly 1 unit long... "normals" are usually normalized vectors.)
