3D art is a lot of geometry. Normals are one high-level concept that may be of particular interest for many 3D artists, depending on the type of thing that you enjoy creating most.

We know, we know—nobody wants to be thinking about math in the cockpit. Hear us out, though. They're pretty interesting and really useful in many cases.

Normals in 3D Modeling Explained

The normals of a UV sphere in Blender

A normal in 3D modeling is a depiction of the orientation of a polygon's surface. It's basically a perpendicular line jutting out from the plane. When you're dealing with a curve, you'll use the plane lying tangent to the point in question to find its normal.

Normals are a visual representation of something that isn't always easy to discern through a digital 3D viewport. It's a bit of extra information that ensures that you always know exactly what you're looking at.

What are normals good for, aside from looking awesome? Normals are used when applying things like bump textures to your model and when calculating things like any lighting you have applied.

How to Display Normals in Blender

Normal overlays in Blender are available only in Edit Mode when you're modifying a mesh-based object. Click into the Viewport Overlays dropdown at the top right-hand corner of your viewport area.

The normals display option in Blender.

At the bottom, you should see your options for displaying your model's normals. Vertex normals, split normals, and face normals can all be toggled on or off individually. You can also specify the length of each normal and even choose to constrain them to this length no matter how close or far you're zoomed in or out.

What's the difference between the three types of normals that you'll find here?

  • Vertex Normals stick straight out from each vertex and intersection
  • Split Normals represent surface discontinuity, carried out through every vertex and intersection of the mesh
  • Face Normals are representative of the pitch of each discrete face of the mesh

Try them one at a time or flip them all on at once. After a while, you'll learn which normals are most useful to your work and your approach.

Related: Blender UV Mapping: Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Use Normals in 3D Modeling

Normal overlays are a handy feature that can be helpful in many types of 3D workflows and contexts. They also look really cool, for what that's worth. Suddenly, we're mathematicians, toiling away in the lab.