mr_spikey
01-29-2010, 01:53 PM
Hi guys,
I am having a hell of a time getting normal maps to render in Mental Ray in Maya 2009, can anyone help me?
The symptoms are that when rendering in MR, the model appears like the normal maps have been applied as a bump map (like the blue-ish colored normal map has been converted to greyscale, and applied as a bump map)
Some info:
-I am using Maya's transfer maps feature to bake the details from my high poly model to my low poly model.
-The normal maps are assigned to a Blinn material, with the normal map assigned to the "Bump" slot and set to "Tangent Space" normals
-My normal maps themselves look great. With Maya's "High quality" viewport rendering enabled, they model looks exactly as expected with the normal map applied. The model also renders perfectly using Maya's Hardware renderer (NOT the software renderer, obviously). They also render perfectly if I import them into a game engine (UDK). I am 100% certain that the normal maps are good, and the problem lies with Mental Ray (after weeks of fiddling and testing!)
I have noticed that if I set the bump node to "Tangent Space", or set it to "Bump" the render result is identical. It seems as if Mental Ray is interpreting my normal map as a greyscale bump map, no matter what I configure it to.
I have seen old "Normal Map shader" plugins for old versions of Maya (as described in this thread: http://www.mymentalray.com/forum/showthread.php?t=58&highlight=normal+mapping ), but since I could set the bump node to "tangent space normals" I assumed that Maya/Mental Ray would support normal maps by default, without having to install a plugin?
So to summarize:
Does Mental Ray really support normal maps? (Can you speak from experience, or just hearsay?)
Am I missing something here?
Thanks!!
I am having a hell of a time getting normal maps to render in Mental Ray in Maya 2009, can anyone help me?
The symptoms are that when rendering in MR, the model appears like the normal maps have been applied as a bump map (like the blue-ish colored normal map has been converted to greyscale, and applied as a bump map)
Some info:
-I am using Maya's transfer maps feature to bake the details from my high poly model to my low poly model.
-The normal maps are assigned to a Blinn material, with the normal map assigned to the "Bump" slot and set to "Tangent Space" normals
-My normal maps themselves look great. With Maya's "High quality" viewport rendering enabled, they model looks exactly as expected with the normal map applied. The model also renders perfectly using Maya's Hardware renderer (NOT the software renderer, obviously). They also render perfectly if I import them into a game engine (UDK). I am 100% certain that the normal maps are good, and the problem lies with Mental Ray (after weeks of fiddling and testing!)
I have noticed that if I set the bump node to "Tangent Space", or set it to "Bump" the render result is identical. It seems as if Mental Ray is interpreting my normal map as a greyscale bump map, no matter what I configure it to.
I have seen old "Normal Map shader" plugins for old versions of Maya (as described in this thread: http://www.mymentalray.com/forum/showthread.php?t=58&highlight=normal+mapping ), but since I could set the bump node to "tangent space normals" I assumed that Maya/Mental Ray would support normal maps by default, without having to install a plugin?
So to summarize:
Does Mental Ray really support normal maps? (Can you speak from experience, or just hearsay?)
Am I missing something here?
Thanks!!