OTOY Forums

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?

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

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?

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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