Normal maps

[bpzen]

I know Octane is not supporting displacment maps, can octane/poser plugin support normal maps to give things like rocks and stuff like that some depth and detail?

Is this teh same as baump in octane?

thanks

[face_off]

If you want to try normal maps, there are plugins for GIMP and Photoshop to convert bump maps to normal maps (they are different) which work very well. If you plug in a normal map, it will override anything plugged into the bump map.

Paul

[bpzen]

thanks paul, dose the FAQ or manual describe how to plug in a normal map?

iv ento doen it and it s not obvious to me how to do so, thanks

[face_off]

If you can to the manual (http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Poser/) and search for "normal" you will find it.

Paul

[bpzen]

thanks paul, it tells me what to set it to but how to change or add normal map is a mystery to me. Im lookign at a material that has a bump map in octane i want to try a normal map with. I am unsure how to eitehr add teh noirmal or change the bump to a normal in teh matieral tab.

Is there a guide or description on teh steps to do this?

"Bump / Normal Both the Bump and Normal channels can load images to control the amount of bump mapping and normal mapping. The Bump channel should be set to floatimage to load a bump map. The Normal channel should be set to the image data type to load a full color normal map."

[face_off]

The steps are:

1) Use the Photoshop or GIMP "Bump map to normal map converter" (you'll need to google for this - but the links have also been mentioned in these forums) to convert the texturemap file in the bump map slot of your material to a normal map file.

2) Change the node type of the "norma" pin from "floattexture" to "image". Click the image load button and load the normal map from 1) above.

Paul

[bpzen]

thanks paul

[bpzen]

Hi Paul, the normal maps are really good for brining out the detail, im using them on a rocky surface and its 100X better than the results i had with out using normals. One question, it seems I lose ability to leverage Roughness along with bump. Is there a way to use Normals and get a roughness effect e,g wet/shiney? I treid matiral mix but adjusting roughness in the non normal node had no effect at all.

thanks

[face_off]

My only suggestion for bringing out my shine would be to reduce the power of the normal map - perhaps it is making the surface too rough to get a wet surface look.

paul

[samhal]

Quick question....

I found several normal map generators (crazybump, Ndo2, ShaderMap2, etc) that look promising, but my question is, what is the different between grayscale (wouldn't this be a bump?) and RGB normal maps? The Octane documentation say it uses the RGB flavor, but will either work? Some of these generators only seem to do grayscape maps.

Thanks?