NormalMaps + Triplanar Issue

[JonasNöll]

Hi,

I opened a topic before in the 5 Beta but it's not accesible anymore.
Basically following issue still persists: If you connect a Bitmap/VRayBitmap through a triplanar for a normalmap it doesn't work.
In the stable release of V-Ray it just doesn't show the normal map at all, and in the latest nightly it even totally destroys the normals (pic)

Notice: I know that the official way is VRayTriplanar -> VRayBitmap -> VRayNormal and that also works, but any older V-Ray versions can't use this setup because the mapping source in the V-Ray Bitmap was only added later.
So in earlier versions it worked like this and now if you want to render any older setup you need to rebuild all your shaders to the new way. Is there any possibility to make it backwards compatible so that it renders the same like in earlier V-Ray versions? Was no issue at all in V-Ray Next for example.
So now in my shading library I would need to have 2 version for each shader, one that works with V-Ray 5 and one that works with older versions. That is a huge issue for me. Would be great if there could be some solution

[hermit.crab]

Try using the following method: Bitmap>VRayNormal>VRayTriplanr>VRayMtl as described in the notes here. It should give identical results in both V-Ray NEXT and V-Ray 5.

[JonasNöll]

Hi, seems this works indeed. But the other way is technically better because then you can blend different normalmaps with different triplanar scaling in a composite before you apply as a normalmap. If the triplanar comes at the very end of the chain it will all have one scaling only.
Before in earlier versions and NEXT it also worked like this way, so I just wonder if V-Ray 5 can stay compatible? Because now all shaders from earlier scenes render totally with wrong normals in V-Ray 5 and I would need to go through all of them 1 by 1 to fix it.