Chaos texture normals seem broken

[tombyrom]

Hello,
I noticed this when I first started using Octane but coming up against it in almost every scene. When using Chaos texture in the normal slot, when rotation is turned on in the Chaos Texture slot the normals look completely strange for at least half the coverage, flattening out large areas of the coverage and causing reflection differences... This causes weird looking textures and makes the normal unusable in most cases with Chaos Texture + Rotation. Are the normals being updated to their new direction when rotation is turned on in the Chaos Texture? Or is something else going on?


Thanks

[tombyrom]

EDIT: Actually it seems to be clashing with the displacement map (vertex or baked chaos texture to texture displacement) changing the normal chaos texture tile size so it is not exactly the same as the displacement chaos texture tile size seems to fix it?

[tombyrom]

So this is the issue if you want to replicate

- Chaos texture in both normal and displacement
- Make sure they have same tile size and coverage + rotation turned on
- Displacement can be vertex displacment or a baked texture displacment - it does not matter as long as there is height on either.
- You should see areas of your texture where the normals are cancelling each other out


- Then change either the normal or displacement chaos texture tile size or coverage value so it is slightly different, a .01 is enough
- Normals should then get calculated normally and evenly, but there is an offset so it looks a bit blurry

[tombyrom]

Well this confirms normals are also not calculated based on the chaos texture rotation....

[tombyrom]

The issue I mentioned above displacement/normal map clashing seems to be an issue with 3dsmax Octane implementation, I recreated the same scene in standalone and it works fine (albeit the normals are not rotated correctly) the displacement and normal maps work together when rotation is turned on in the Chaos texture and I get no weirdness.

Can I send over the scene to anyone to debug the issue in max?

I have also tried inverting the normals but it makes no difference to the outputted image, it just switches where the smooth areas are

[tombyrom]

I tell a lie, this is also a problem in standalone! The normal map was not plugged in on the above screenshot.... It's an issue in standalone 2024 and I have just tested in standalone 2025 which has some fixes for normal rotation and this seems to fix the issue.... So looks like the issue all along was the normal rotation

[paride4331]

Hi tombyrom,
Could you kindly share the scene where you are encountering the issue you're reporting?
3dsMax > File > archive
Regards
Paride

[tombyrom]

Hello Paride,
I believe the issue will be fixed once the 3dsmax plugin is updated to 2025, the issue was there in standalone after testing and the new 2025 standalone with fixes to the chaos texture normals being rotated correctly fixes the issue.
Thanks