Normal mapping, in the world of computer graphics, is a technique used to fake the lighting of bump or dents. It is an extremely common practice as it distorts the appearance and details of a low poly (polygons) model or object by generating a normal map from a high poly model. Normal maps are generally stored as regular RGB (Red, Green and Blue) images where the X,Y,Z coordinates correspond with the RGB coordinates of the surface normal.
Normal mapping use to only be possible on a parallel rendering machine called PixelFlow, which was built at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Later it became possible to perform normal mapping using multi-pass rendering and framebuffer operations, however with technological advances and the use of the plethora (which is basically like saying many but I really enjoy the word plethora so i try and use it whenever i can, its just such a fun word to say) of shaders in PCs and Gaming consoles, normal Mapping is now widely used in commercial games.
It`s popularity for real-time rendering is a result of its good quality processing requirements ratio compared to other methods that produce the same or similar results and effects. For those interested check out this link for a great tutorial on Normal Mapping:
Click on the image below for tutorial
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