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	This is meant to be a simple tutorial on the basics of normal mapping. Keep in mind that this is just barely scratching the surface of a very cool and expansive technique. Also, this tutorial is not meant to be advanced, but if your a complete beginner to 3d you may want to start somewhere else first, as you may find this a bit confusing.
	The basic idea of normal mapping is that you use a high resolution model to generate normal information which is then applied to a low resolution version of the same model. The "normal map" will look something like this:
	Note that there are more than two colors. You will generally find a range of blues, violets, and sometimes green as well. This is what makes normal maps different from bump maps. Bump maps only use value (instead of value and color) which only allows them to display "in and out/up and down." Since normal maps use different colors, they are able to display "in and out" as well as normal direction.
	With that said, creating a normal map in maya 7 is very easy. The first step, of course, is to create a high resolution model. Here is mine:
	When creating your high res models, remember, these will never see the game engine...in other words feel free to bevel, smooth, divide etc. to your hearts content. If you use multiple objects in your high res object, you can either combine them, or leave them separate (if you chose the second option, be sure that you select all of them in the "Surface Sampler" step).
	The next step is to create your low resolution geometry. Be sure to keep it the same size, and in the same world space. For mine, since I built the high res object right in the middle of the world, without changing the size, all I have to do is create a default polygon cube. Your low res object needs to be properly UV mapped, with all the UVs inside the 0-1 texture space (since my model is a cube, it comes pre-mapped and I dont need to change the UVs at all).
	Now we will generate the normal map. Go to Modify --> Surface Sampler. Select your low res geometry and click on "Add Selected" under Target "Surfaces." Next, Select your high res geometry and click on "Add Selected" under "Source Surfaces." You dont technically need to do this second step, but its a good habit to get into in case there is other geometry in the scene that you may have forgotten about. Now, go to "Outputs" choose where you want to save, what size (512 will probably be fine in this case), and the file format (tiff or targa will be ok). Then click on "Bake and Close." You should get something roughly resmbling the above example of a normal map. Keep in mind, that there are many different options when creating the normal map that I am not going to talk about here. The default options will work in this case, but if your going to get deeper into normal mapping, be sure to hit the friendly F1 key and find out what everything else does :)
	Now, to apply the map to the low res geometry. Go to Window --> Hypershade and create a new Blinn material (this isn't completely necessary, but usually normal maps look cooler if their a little bit shiny.) There are multiple ways to connect the nodes, but the easiest is to map a file texture into "bump mapping button on the Blinn. Choose your normal map as the file and then double click on the 2dbump node and where it says "Use As," change it to "Tangent Space Normals" (this will tell it to look at the file as a normal map instead of a plain old bump map).
	At first, you wont see a change so go to the "Shading" menu (in the viewport itself) and turn on "High Quality Rendering." Now you should see the normal map appearing on the low res object.
	If your not seeing anything make sure you hit 6 on the keyboard (to view textures). If you still dont get anything, then i dont know what to tell you, except that you messed something up somewhere along the way :)
	For a bit of extra fun, try creating a point light, hitting 7 on the keyboard (to view lighting and textures) and move the light around a litte. Pretty cool huh?
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