How do you setup your normal map shaders in maya?

[crazyfool]

what is the correct way of putting a normal map into maya material editor?

as in you have your blinn material and you have added your colour, spec etc but then you want to add your normal map to it.

this is because I was talking to monkiilord and we are both having a little strangeness happening with our normal maps. now the normal maps are fine but when we add lighting to the mix it starts doing strangeness and doesn't react to the lights like they should. here are some screens, i got a blue point light to one side and an orange to the other and an ambient over head set to a grey tone.

this is hardware rendering


this is how it comes out in maya software/mental ray/turtle




now the specular levels have not been changed in the images from the default but when you do it seems like the lights dont hit the object properly and reflect off the wrong side.

just wondering how people are doing theirs because I only know of two different ways of applying the normal map to your shader and know there is loads of different ways but what is the best way of applying your normal map to your blinn texture?

the way I set this one up was
1. I went into the material editor and created a blinn and a file texture.
2. went into connection editor
3. loaded them in left and right
4. connected file>out colour to blinn>normal camera
5. assigned my normal map to the file texture
6. applied to model

any help is greatly appreciated

sorry if you have read this before but I put it in the wrong thread before.

[latinmessiah]

In Maya 7, at least:

1) Select the blinn shader in the Hypershade.
2) Hit CTRL + A to open it's Common Material Attributes.
3) Click the "Bump Mapping" checkerboard icon and load the normal map texture.
4) In the "Bump2D" tab (still in Common Material Attributes) and under "2D Bump Attributes", set "Use As" from "Bump" to "Tangent Space Normals". You can also fine tune the "Bump Depth" here.
5) Render using Maya Hardware.

At least that's how I preview normal maps in Maya. I haven't had any luck rendering normal maps in Maya Software or Mental Ray.

[crazyfool]

thats a much simpler way of doing it. I am using maya 8.5 and this is how it comes out for me using your technique. It looks like maya software is looking at it through a bitmap instead of vector based format. But yea, its much better and seems to work in mental ray in 8.5 which is awesome.



The way I did the normal maps before does work in Maya software but this is what it looks like with the same lighting setup as before. The left is how it comes out and the right is once you have dulled down the lighting a bit.

[benclark]

you can download a normal mapping node for Maya Software from Pixero's site

Jan Sandström

but I always just stick with Mental Ray