Normal pass

[kirk]

I need to render a normal pass and found 3 different ways to render it. The problem is that the all one sided polygons: leafs , grass etc. are are rendered "one-sided', not the way the renderer do it for general color pass.

Is it possible to get a correct normal pass somehow with all the materials being 2-sided and not showing flipped normal colors?

[kavorka]

My guess is no. You would probably have to change the mesh in your 3D program to be double sided, then it should work.

[kirk]

Tried it but beside of doubled polycount it makes a kind of z fighting or something and turns into a complete mess on such thing like leafs while rendering normal pass


I also tried to do camera/view direction based normal RGB material like one in Zbrush .
For camera Z axis it works fine with falloff material but I can't find how to rotate falloff to view x and y axis. Is it possible somehow?

[kavorka]

can you do a normal pass in your 3D software that has more options?

[kirk]

I import directly from Zbrush so it's not an option.

Beside I am trying to render normal map texture , it would never look same crisp and pixel perfect if rendered in other soft

[kavorka]

wait, what are you trying to use the normal pass in Octane for?

I may be misunderstanding what you're doing, but you just made it seem like you want to create a normal map. That is not what the normal pass is for and you cannot use Octane to make one.

I use Blender, which is free software, and you can bring your Zbrush model in (high poly and base mesh) and then create a normal map from that in Blender. Then load the base mesh in Octane and apply the normal map.

I may be totally missing what you are trying to do though.

[kirk]

I want to use it for in-game environment textures and backgrounds. They are mostly flat things so using Octane is perfectly possible with just a bit of channel swapping from what top and front view render in Octane. And that is another reason why I don't want to mess with camera/scene transfer to other soft.

By the way Blender has a nice gpu renderer which can do a correct normal pass needing only a bit of post-remapping and channel inversion. But I like Octane more.


Is it possible to render a mask of flipped polygons somehow? To flip back the normal colors in Photoshop?

[kavorka]

I still feel like this is a bad solution. And I wouldn't use cycles to create the normals either. There is a way to import both your high res mesh and base mesh in blender and bake the tangent normals to an image based on your model UV's. I haven't done this in a while, so i can't give you the process, but it is going to be much better than using a front view in Octane and doing a normal pass.

[kirk]

Baking texture for a model is only a part of what you want to do for in-game texturing. A huge amount of environment textures are not UV or geometry specific and using texture baker for them is just a waste of time.

Besides it generally takes forever for texture bakers to bake highly complicated environment things into modern hi-res textures and often they have a lot of restrictions and inconveniences.

Blender do it more or less quickly only because of low quality aliased output. Try to bake some grass or fur into a texture for example or some tiny details with a lot of alpha transparency.

[Jaberwocky]

Kirk

I have Sculptris Alpha 6 release.You can export a normal map in the paint section.As Sculptris is owned by Zbrush, perhaps you can export/import your model from Zbrush directly to Sculptris, then go to paint and save a normals map from there.

Just a thought!

Jaba