The main difference, from algorithmic point of view, is that for bump mapping, the renderer must derive the normal from a height-field. This involves, for each shaded point, calculating the texture at *several* (usually 4) other points to derive the bumped surface normal. This may be slow and not quite precise.
A normal map, on the other hand, stores normals directly, not a height-field, so the bumped normal can be obtained directly with just one texture evaluation and with more precision at the same time.
I know this is probably something you snapped together in an hour or so but I’m curious if you plan to further develop it to distribute with VRay. I’m using it in a VRayBlendMtl three times over and it seems to really be slowing MEdit updates to a crawl. I need to do some more tests but I can imagine that my procedural noise… etc bump maps may have something to do with the time it takes to convert and update. Is there any chance that it can be sped up or is it just the nature of the beast when converting data like this?
There’s not much data to convert really so I’m not sure why it would be so slow; anyways, in newer builds of V-Ray there is a VRayBumpNormals render element which does the same thing.
That doesn’t work for this purpose though… remember, the idea is to convert procedural maps to normal maps on the fly in order to use them directly in the render without having to do any texture baking. Specifically for use with Relief mapping. It’s not critical but still nice to have
I’m getting “DLL <C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2009\plugins\vraybump2normal90.dlt> failed to initialize. Error code 126 - The specified module could not be found.”
max is behaving really weird in this scene..ive got the scene in meters, shadow bias set to 0.002, and when i set bump map filtering to 0.01, i hardly see it…i have to raise it to 0.05 to see something but its nowhere near where i d liked it to be…
…this of course dowsnt change anything on the posts ive written above, simply vlados bump2normal map is not functioning…and neither is the max normal bump
…am starting to feel there is something wrong with the bump map but i really cant tell what it is…
if i post the maps, would anyone be intereseted to try it out?
its actually quite nice large brick tile maps :)))
I tried the plugin [max 2008 32bit] but found it rather unstable …crash…crash
HEY VLADO ..would it be difficult or even possible to implement the relief mapping technique directly within vray??? It seems to be a really good technique for getting that bit more out of textures without resorting to displacement. Would love to know your thoughts as I feel this could be a very powerful tool.
