Transform After Normalizing

You're correct. Rotating a triangle can point it in a new direction, changing its normal. Remember what a normal is: a vector that points in the direction that the surface faces, and has length 1.

Scaling and translating a triangle cannot affect its normal. Think about stretching or moving a triangle laid flat on the ground. No matter where you move it or stretch it, it's still flat on the ground, and so still facing in the same direction and still has the same normal.

EDIT: jdindia is right, applying a scaling transform in general can affect the normal too. I was thinking only of uniform scales. If your scale is uniform, then scaling by a positive won't affect the normal, and scaling by a negative will flip the normal (make it negative).

[Edited by - Melekor on November 30, 2008 3:20:02 AM]

Scaling will definitely do it if it's not uniform and not corrected.

Also, you have to apply the appropriate transform to the normal vector. You don't treat it like a vertex. OpenGL and DirectX take care of this for you, unless you're writing a shader.

http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/glsl/index.php?normalmatrix
gives an explanation of this.

Good to see i am not going crazy! Thanks for the help. :-)