I am using Vantage live inside of SketchUp. I am finding that bump maps look very exaggerated in Vantage in comparison to the expected look coming from VRay. It’s almost like the values are 10 fold. Is this because normal maps are preferred over bumps in Vantage? Am I missing something?
It’s because Vantage doesn’t match all of the details of the V-Ray bump mapping algorithm. So results can be quite off. Normal mapping on the other hand should be much closer (or almost the same).
If it’s possible, please start a support ticket with a scene that shows the 10 fold issue. We might be able to improve it.
If you are not using procedural maps, you can try disabling the “shading graphs for bump maps” option in Vantage which should give you a closer result.
Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev
I’m not using procedural maps, unfortunately. Could there be a utility that takes a bump and makes a normal from it automatically? I think Lumion had this years ago.
I don’t know about this, you have to ask the V-Ray for SketchUp team about it or search in its docs.
I think that is only created when SketchUp has the normal map flip option selected in the sketchup material edit section.
SketchUp has got a mixture of DirectX format and OpenGL format materials, but itself only expects openGL ones - same as V-Ray.
That toggle is turned on for the DirectX format ones.
If you manually needed to create a node or texture to perform the same thing in v-ray (if you had some DX normal maps you were using ) you can wrap the bitmap in a color correction node and then inverse the green channel - which will do the same thing.
Hello,
Thank you for your report Matthew and for the example.
I am finding that bump maps look very exaggerated in Vantage in comparison to the expected look coming from VRay.
We have logged an improvement ticket (LAV-3014) internally for the bump map intensity differences.
Another question I have is regarding setting a normal map with the Normal Map Flip texture type. I don’t see a way to create this manually
As Adam pointed out Normal Map Flip is automatically created for some SketchUp materials. You can either use Color Correction to adjust your own normal textures or copy and reuse Normal Map Flip from the converted SketchUp material that you have in your scene.