I watched the normalmap tutorial philip's made, but besides it being way cool, and a good tutorial, there's something I'd like explained: why? (i'm thinking games)
I'm not sure I fully understand why normalmaps are smarter than hi-poly models. Sure you can some excellent details in there, but isn't rendering a normalmapped model as taxing on your system as rendering a hi-poly model? Again, thinking games. I'm thinking that a hi-def map would be as tough to calculate as a super fine mesh; getting rgb-values for every pixel must be pretty hard for the hardware...
I guessing I'm dead wrong since normalmaps are hot
