Direction is [0.5, 1, 0]	Direction is [1, 1, 0]	Direction is [1, 0.5, 0]

Each channel in the bitmap corresponds to a spatial dimension (X, Y and Z). These spatial dimensions are relative to a varying coordinate system based on the derivatives of position with respect to texture coordinates. Individual components for any direction should be in the range [–1, 1]. But to be encoded into an RGB texture with 8 bits per component, they are mapped into the range [0, 1]. So the XYZ (0, 0, –1) will be remapped to the RGB (0.5, 0.5, 0) values. It's also possible to use an angle texture to convert the direction to the a color.