Hi,
It seems shocking to me that the V-Ray Normal Map node only supports tangent space normals. What is going on here? Isn’t it super important to support different normal formats?
I saw another forum post where someone was asking about object space normals. The reply was to use the 3ds Max native “Normal Bump” node.
https://forums.chaos.com/forum/v-ray…ace-normal-map
But that node is flagged as incompatible by the Chaos developers, therefore it will not show up at all in the Material/Map Browser unless the user enables “Show Incompatible”. Additionally, the renderer displays a warning saying that the node is not compatible and may cause problems.
However, in my limited tests, “Normal Bump” seems to be working.
So which is it? Is the “Normal Bump” node compatible or not? Does it cause problems or not? Is the flagging as incompatible in error or not?
The reply in the other forum post also made reference to “the integrated OSL Normal map”. What is this referring to, exactly? I see an “OSL: Normal” node, but that is for render-time shading points, not vertex normals. I don’t see any OSL node for accepting a normal bitmap connection and converting that to a Bump channel.
There are also some MaterialX nodes, but it looks like MaterialX is totally undocumented. Or at least I was not able to find any information on how to use the nodes such as MaterialX “normalmap”.
I would appreciate some clear, unambiguous information about how V-Ray users are supposed to apply normal maps that are not in the tangent space format.
If the native “Normal Bump” node actually works in V-Ray, then it should not be flagged as incompatible.
Thanks in advance,
Aaron