Normal Map
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Normal maps are used to fake the appearance of minor details that aren't present in the actual mesh. Normal maps are typically used for details such as leather grain, cloth texture, pitted metal, bevels, seams, and so on.
The game uses tangent space normal maps. Tangent space maps don't use the blue channel and it's always set to 255. The red and green channels indicate how far the surface's normal should be deflected in the X and Y directions respectively, where the mid-point value of 127 means no deviation. As a result, flat surfaces have the RGB color 127, 127, 255 which explains the overall bluish-purple hue normal maps have.
Normal maps are located in the Data/Textures directory tree and are suffixed with "_n" (e.g., Data/Textures/Clothes/VaultSuit/VaultSuit81_n.DDS) and are stored using the BC5 format.
When editing normal maps, keep in mind that they are not encoding color information and as a result they cannot be rotated or mirrored.
