Baking out normals from a material (Not a high poly object)

Hi there,

I am currently trying to perfect a rather odd workflow of modelling in blender and then rendering in 3ds max / vray.
I’ve made some good progress but have hit a snag… the modelling side is fine, fbx exporter works perfectly.
However, I have limited knowledge of vray materials and have found it hard to pull off the same results in vray that I can in cycles, when it occurred to me… why not simplify it with baking.

Its proving great so far, with one minor problem. When I try to bake out normal maps, I get nothing. Well, just a purple featureless image. I’m assuming its attempting to get true normal information from a high-poly sculpt, you know, typical normal baking. But that’s not what I want, I want it to take whatever normal maps are used in the material and bake it out. The picture below should help make it clearer.


Now as you can see I managed to get a passable normal map by re-configuring the material to use the displacement noodley bit, but that’s the only way it would work. Any regular bump/normal map nodes are ignored.

Any ideas?

For reference, this is the node layout of the original cycles material, before I altered it to feed through the displacement node. If left like this, you get a blank normal map.


Edit: Just to avoid the inevitable, ‘Why would you want to work this way’… simply put, I love vray, I love blender, I dislike 3ds Max and I find cycles great but sllloooow by comparison. That should answer most of the ‘why’ questions :slight_smile:

Totally what I needed, thankyou.