Surface normal compression/decompression storing two vector components

Abstract

A high precision, memory efficient method for the compression of surface normals and the inverse method for the decompression of those compressed surface normals back into surface normals. The normals are first scaled to unit length in Cartesian coordinates. Then, each of the smallest two vector components of the unit length normal is stored along with an indicator of which of the three vector components is not stored plus the algebraic sign of that vector component. Decompression of the surface normal requires first converting the two stored vector components into floating-point values and then using the equation 1=x2+y2+z2 in order to obtain the non-stored vector component of the unit length normal.

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