Animated creature in Castle Game Engine with normalmaps baked from Blender Sculpt
You can use Blender ( http://blender.org/ ) "Bake" feature to bake normalmaps from a high-poly model to be applied on a low-poly model. You can create the high-poly model e.g. using the "Sculpt Mode" in Blender.
Such normalmaps can be immediately used as the "normalMap" texture for Castle Game Engine ( http://castle-engine.sourceforge.net/ ).
The resulting model reacts nicely to lighting. It has a detailed shading, just like the high-poly version. But the geometry comes from the low-poly version, so it's still very fast to render. This technique is 100% dynamic: both the creature, and the light, may be animated in any way, and the shading changes correctly.
The sample model is available in https://github.com/castle-engine/demo... . You can open it in view3dscene, and use the "Edit - Lights Editor" to move the light's location, and use the "Animation - Named Animation - ..." to run a particular animation. For now, use the view3dscene version from snapshots on http://michalis.ii.uni.wroc.pl/castle... or GitHub sources on https://github.com/castle-engine/view... .
To use this technique in your own models, you need to use the "normalMap" field of the Appearance.
You can add it by manually editing an .x3d or .castle-anim-frames file, after exporting if from Blender.
You can specify normalMap in the material_properties.xml file.
See the "normalMap" documentation on http://michalis.ii.uni.wroc.pl/cge-ww... and the material_properties.xml documentation on http://michalis.ii.uni.wroc.pl/cge-ww... . And see the examples in demo-models/bump_mapping/ .