I recently came across a great tutorial showing how to use Crazybump to make normal maps among other things. The tutorial I watched was done in cycles render, and I’d like to be able to bake the normal map I exported from Crazybump onto a UV map.
I tried just adding a second texture to the material but it just makes the normal map the default texture, so my object looks purple. Is there a tutorial somewhere on how to do this?
Connect the normal map texture (non color data) to a normal map node connected to the shader normal input
Ah thank you, but I mean in blender render. I already have my mesh made in blender render. Is there any way to do that?
In the Texture / Image Sampling panel enable ‘Normal Map’ and set influence to ‘Normal’
Hmm, that does work, but wont it be just a generic normal map? What if I want to use one I created in crazybump? How do I apply that to my mesh in Blender? Or is it going to be the same thing?
How is the normal map different ?
Well I created the normal map in Crazybump, a third party program. I tweaked it all inside Crazybump, then saved it as a .jpeg file and now I want to use that.
It may not be different; I’m completely new to all this, but I figured that was the purpose of using a program like Crazybump. With Crazybump I was able to tweak a bunch of settings to get it just right. If it isn’t different I’m not sure why Crazybump even exists, haha.
Well I created the normal map in Crazybump, a third party program
So why should this make any difference on how you add a normal map ?
If you create an .jpg image in photoshop or gimp or paint, are they all different and have to be added each in different ways to your model ?
A normal map is a normal map. If what points out should point in just reverse the influence value
When I try it like this:
it just makes my object purple. When I don’t use the normal map image, and I tick Image Mapping>Normal Map Influence>Geometry>Normal on my texture, it creates a normal map, but it’s just using Blender to create it right? I want to use my .jpeg normal map image along with my texture I have assigned to that material.
No, it doesn’t create it. By ticking the normal map option you tell Blender the texture image you provided is not a color image but a normal map that contains surface direction data instead.
Then you would supposedly tell it how to map it on the model, and then how it influences the material.
You also do not want to save a normal map as a .jpg. Save it as a .png.
Ok. But how isn’t there a difference between normal maps? I took 1 image and imported it into Crazybump. I then slid the sliders around to change the normal map around.
The two normal maps using the same source texture look completely different. Here is the tutorial I have been referencing.
I am trying to get the normal map I made using this program into my project. You can see around 11:50 the differences he is making to the normal map. The problem is, he uses nodes in cycles render to get that generated normal map onto a material. I am using blender render and I wanted to know if there is a similar way to do it.
To display a normal map in Blender Render you already have created previously, it’s actually simple :
Create a material in the Material panel if your model does not already have one
Go then in the Texture panel and add a new texture for that material
Set the Type to “Image or Movie” instead of the default “Clouds” and click on Open in the Image tab, load the normal map image you created with your crazybump software
Then in the Image Sampling tab, enable “Normal Map”
Once done, in the Mapping tab, change the Coordinate setting to UV if your model has an UV (and it should have from what you describe), instead of letting it on Generated.
Finally, on the Influence tab disable the “Color” setting and enable the “Normal” setting
Now when you will render, your model will use the normal map you created in another software.
You may need to tweak the Normal setting in the Influence if your normal map is rendered too strongly
Bingo, thank you!
