Posted August 29, 2020 by droid productions
I decided to revisit how the cards are being managed and rendered. There were a couple of steps involved.
For each pixel on the image, the Normal Map contains the angle of the surface at that pixel; it's encoded as X (Red), Y (Green) and Z (Blue) in the texture map. The blue-ish cards are the Normal Maps (blue because most of the surfaces point straight towards the camera.
The second step was to rebuild card movement; to show off the nice Normal Maps, I wanted a big of rotation on the cards when they move; the simplest way to do that in Unity was driving it all through the physics system.