I am trying to bake the rounded edges made via VRayEdgesTex into a normal map with “Render to Texture” using the VRayBumpNormals element. And while it does SOMEWHAT work, I am still having some problems:
As you can see the two edges marked with the arrows show the bump in different directions. The right one seems to be correct, the left one appears flipped. So I guess the baked normal map doesn’t take the object-space orientation of the faces into consideration. For now I’m using automatically unwrapped UVs, so maybe there is a way to correct for this when unwrapping manually?
EDIT2: Aaaaand, I’ve found a fix. Buried in a blog post by jazznazz about a script for baking maps, I’ve found the info that “The green channel needs to be inverted If you’re going to use that Normal Map in e.g Unity”. Bam! That did it
First of all it looks like VRayBumpNormalsMap doesn’t support UV esge padding, which still keeps a visible seam along the actual edge (which can also be seen in the image in the first post). Wheras if the normal map would work correctly the real edge shouldn’t be visible in shading anymore, right?
Also I’ve noticed that the VRayEdgesTex doesn’t bake properly with Embree enabled. Only a few of the edges show up, most of them not at all. Setting the default geometry type to “Dynamic” (even with Embree enabled) causes the same problems.
But I guess this leads to at least one feature request:
Please add the option for “edge padding” (basically “extending” the edge pixels of the UV shells) to work with the VRayBumpNormalsElement.
