(((Sigh))) What's Normal Anyway?

So, to go along with the nightmare that has been clicking on windows creators update because I kept getting the window …

        I know I did it.

I had decided to download 2.78.5 hash-e to play with the new principled shader a bit and while I can get all the slides to effect a mesh, using image texture nodes (and normal mapping/vector) according to BaseColor, Metallic, Roughness, Normal … node points nothing is really seeming to work. Base color is meh - it changes the color but, it’s not very detailed or anything-pretty sure it’s broken for me. If I plug anything into metallic, it seems to shift to full diffuse (using a free metal package from MR. Price’s website). Even when, the only thing I try to do is the normal and I change the strength, all I can see happening is … basically the light reflection/glare path moves across the surface. Almost like I were moving the lamp over the surface. There is absolutely no detail at all. I can’t even project an image onto a plane, and I am at a loss for why this might be happening?

I’m not having any other sort of issues with display functions that I know of.

even when I use just a simple Image Texture — Diffuse — Material Output (surface) node tree applied to a plane … I get a solid diffuse color …

Ideas??

even when I use just a simple Image Texture — Diffuse — Material Output (surface) node tree applied to a plane … I get a solid diffuse color …
Did you UV unwrap the object or use some other texture coordinates instead ?
No demo .blend file supplied with your post to clearly demonstrate the issue. Why have you failed to do this ??

Because I’m a giant nub. The quick summary video I watched by he whom shall not be mentioned, for some reason, gave me the impression that black magic was at play. I’m still at a loss though … because I know I hit, ctrl+t and generated the TC and mapping nodes, and changed Output from UV to Generated, on a simple plane and got nothing. Anyhow, I tossed -e and picked up -f, and everything appears to be working fine.

To note … I had just picked up -e and with all my other problems, it’s possible something just got wonky and needed a clean install. In hind-sight, I probably should have tried that before I posted. But, with reinstalling drivers for Wacom and Nvida about 8 times in the past two days, and trouble shooting the black screen of WTFGTFO due to the lovely Creators update, that was the last thing I wanted to do … more reinstalling.

Setup up that Ethernet connection as a metered connection! Delete distribution folder. Go into regedit and try to block windows updates. Change hardware update settings. Figure out which driver works best … (378.92) and lastly, turn off the screen saver … Finally … you can start playing around with blender again … before you have to pretend to be interested in doing something else with the wife! :stuck_out_tongue: