zbrush to maya normal map help

[hakanpersson]

Which renderer are you using? Try either maya hardware or mental ray. Software does not support tangentbased and will render the normalmap as a bump instead, which mighr explain the odd result.

[arran1]

thanks hakanpersson, but I was using mental ray already.

I tried downloading a new configuration from pixologic, but as you can see in the close up, i'm still having some issues - weird contour lines and triangles.

at the moment i'm trying to get pixero's jsnormalmapper to work, but i'm not sure where to put the lines:

link "{MAYABASE}/lib/JS_NormalMapper.{DSO}"

mi "{MAYABASE}/include/JS_NormalMapper.mi"

in the maya.rayrc file. i've tried every combination i can think of, but still no luck - either mr stops working or it renders it black.

any ideas?...

[hakanpersson]

you can add those lines whereever you want in the file, like in the bottom works fine.

I really dont know why your render looks like it does. Bump maps can produce those results, but never encountered with normalmaps.

Does the normalmap render correct in Zmapper? Does it seem ok in an imageviewer like photoshop. Then you would at least know if its the rendering that is the problem.

Try "high quality render" in the viewport, or maya hardware (yes they are the "same") and see if they render correct. Also uncheck "maya derivatives" in the mental ray render dialogue (under "translation" i think).

[arran1]

hey - thanks hakanpersson :)

i'll give those lines another go.

yeah, the model looks fine in zmapper and also in the viewport when i have high quality on. the normal map looks good too. it's only when i render in mental ray or software that it looks like this. someone mentioned that maybe it was because the image was 8 bit, but i adjusted it in photoshop without any luck.

i've tried other models and also using the surface sampler in maya, but that looks bad too. this is my first normal map though so i must be doing something wrong...

[hakanpersson]

Software treats the normal as bump no matter what you choose, which usually produce something similiar to the banding effect, especially since bump takes the strenght value into account, and "1" is very much. Whilst normalmap ignores that value.

8 bit or not makes no difference, whoever said that meant something else I guess, or misunderstood the problem.

Btw, have you tried to swich format? As far as I remembered mental ray dont accept psd, perhaps that might explain it.

[arran1]

yeah - i've been exporting as a tiff from zbrush.

i actually noticed last night that mental ray is just rendering the normal map as a bump,cos when i changed tangent normals back to bump, it rendered exactly the same. so now i'm not sure if my bump2dnode is broken or if maya 7 has a bug or if i'm still doing something wrong. ha. nightshifts don't help. :)

i'm wondering if i can try to install a new bump2dnode.

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