combining bump maps and/or normal maps.

[Hoax3D]

Hello,

I use the lightwave-octane plugin and some textures from zbrush (mainly a vector displacement map and a normal map for details).
I thought I could use the Octane RidgedFractal Texture as a bump to add some extra details to my normal map.
The problem is that, as mentioned in the documentation, octane will only use the normal input if both normal and bump inputs are used.
This was not the case with the lightwave native render engine.


Does anyone know a way to solve this problem ?
For instance, could I combine the RidgedFractal or any other bump map with my normal map (like in maya) before connecting the result to the normal input ?
Or in the worst case, if I export a bump map instead of a normal map, how can I do a simple "add" operation with another texture to combine the bumps ?

Thx
Manu

[bepeg4d]

hi, the easiest way is to make a copy with bump and without the normal texture, and mix toghether with a mix material
you can make a mix material of a mix material with another material and so on
for mixing different bump maps or procedurals, you can use the mix-texture node.
ciao beppe

[Hoax3D]

Hello beppe and thank you for your answer.
I already tried this but the problem with blending materials or textures with the material mixer or the texture mixer is that you don't get the sum of the bump/normal maps, you mix (or blend) them like with a "normal" blending mode in photoshop. That means the more you see the first texture, the less you see the second one. So it will always lower the details that my normal map brought.

I even noticed that if I connect anything between the normal texture and the normal input of my material, the normal map doesn't do anything anymore. That means no solution for normal maps.
I will try to export a bump map instead, exagerate it in photoshop at 200% and mix it at 50% with the procedural to avoid lowering the sculpted details. That should solve my problem even if it's not a really clean way to work.

Thx
Manu

[FrankPooleFloating]

Hoax, you really should look into nDo -- http://www.quixel.se -- you can add to normals with ease in nDo.

And they have a mind-blowing update to nDo & dDo (and something new called 3Do) coming in about a month...

[Hoax3D]

The boosted bump map solution works quite well.

Hoax, you really should look into nDo -- http://www.quixel.se -- you can add to normals with ease in nDo.

And they have a mind-blowing update to nDo & dDo (and something new called 3Do) coming in about a month...

It looks insane. I already tried that kind of tool in the past like crazybump, also for extracting normals from photographs, but this one looks much better. Thanks for that discovery.

Manu