Lighting without Normals

[Salbris]

From an online tutorial I learned how to add some simple lights to my program. Now in the tutorial he uses normals to generate the lighting on his model. I was lazy and trying to be experimental and I tried lighting without Normals.

Now the lighting doesn't seem right, but yet it still seems to work overall. My model has a gradient of lighting from one side to the other but I can't make out individuals faces.

I'm wondering why is this, and what will adding normals do to my model? Will it make faces easier to see?

FYI: I have a generated terrain of faces so adding normals is not a minor job, although I know the math and will implement soon) I just wanted to understand lighting a bit more.


Thanks.

[Pierre Boudier]

you probably have a global normal for your entire model

[dletozeun]

In 3D rendering, normals describes the orientation of every points on a 3D surface. This information is necessary to determinate how incident light hits the surface and compute its radiance.

To may take a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phong_shading#Phong_reflection_model

And open a good book about 3D rendering! ;)

[Kelvin]

...I tried lighting without Normals.

Now the lighting doesn't seem right, but yet it still seems to work overall.
...
I'm wondering why is this, and what will adding normals do to my model? Will it make faces easier to see?


At least under the glBegin/glEnd paradigm, there is a notion of the "current normal", which exists and has a value even if you never call glNormal*.

From the OpenGL 2.1 spec: "The initial current normal has coordinates (0, 0, 1)."

As I read the OpenGL 2.1 spec, glDrawArrays and the like are defined in terms of glBegin/glEnd in such a way that the "current normal" would be used for all vertices if you enabled lighting but didn't enable the normal array.

I don't know about the more recent GL specs.

Yes, adding normals makes the faces much more three-dimensional.

[Salbris]

Thanks for the information I'll update my code and reply again if I have any problems.