I’ve followed the instructions (on the release notes page for 2.36) to create a normal map, and I can’t seem to get it to work fully.
The X and Y channels seem to appear correctly, but the blue Z channel just seems to get mapped onto the same space as the X channel.
I’ve made sure that the correct channels are selected in each texture “Map Input” page, and double checked each instruction, but the mistake eludes me.
Can anyone tell me where I might be going wrong?
I’ve never really understood those XYZ, buttons. My mistake there was that I set them in the wrong direction. For the z-coords, they have to set like this:
Also, be sure to set the blending mode of the channels to “add”.
If everyting fails, just download the .blend from the site and compare.
Ah, thanks for pointing that out.
No solid clue about what those buttons do, either. The user guide doesn’t really go into detail. (Does the printed user manual go into detail here, or is it not docmented for us newbies?)
Ah, thanks for pointing that out.
Does that mean it’s working now?
No solid clue about what those buttons do, either. The user guide doesn’t really go into detail. (Does the printed user manual go into detail here, or is it not docmented for us newbies?)
I don’t consider myself a newbie, but still I don’t really know how the buttons work. I do know you can let a texture affect only the X, Y or Z, or change the X value to Y. One row/column probably means the object coordinates, the other the texture coordinates and you can map them to eachother in any way you wish.
Yeah, I think I’ve got the normal mapping render to work. I produced a simple tiled-floor mesh, and used it to create a normal map, then used that to produce a colour map and an intensity map.
The resulting image doesn’t look fantastic, however. Looks a bit soft.
I used a 583x583 image to cover 2x2 floor tiles. Is that resolution too small for such a purpose?
It of course depends how big your floortiles are. But I think I generally use higher resolution images. You could experiment with the image texture, disabling or enabling interpol, mipmap, anti alias, etc.
If the floortiles are that simple BTW, wouldn’t it be possible to just use the mesh instead of a normal map?
Oh, and 583x583? I bet you’re dissapointed you can’t use 583.642x583.642… 
I mean, 512x512 would have been more logical.
Yeah, I was thinking that such a simple mesh could be used instead, but would you fancy tiling a floor, one tile at a time? It’d have to be one real important floor.
As for the odd image size, I didn’t actually think about it. The normal mapping render just produced an image where the useful bit was 583 pixels squared. So that ended up being it. For my next attempt, I think I’ll boost it up to a nicer, bigger, even number. (Do powers of two actually help Blender at all?)
Yeah, I was thinking that such a simple mesh could be used instead, but would you fancy tiling a floor, one tile at a time? It’d have to be one real important floor.
Meshes can be duplicated as well, or do I misunderstand your remark?
As for the odd image size, I didn’t actually think about it. The normal mapping render just produced an image where the useful bit was 583 pixels squared. So that ended up being it. For my next attempt, I think I’ll boost it up to a nicer, bigger, even number. (Do powers of two actually help Blender at all?)
I believe with the blender renderer it makes no difference, but as I said, for OpenGL it has to be scaled, which takes CPU power. I don’t know if this means that it’s just not suitable for the game engine, or that the editing of the UV coords will also slow down.
Also, I don’t know if the images should be a power of 2, or a muliple of 64. I think the latter, because I can remember from my half-life editing days, that it has textures of 128x192 pixels.
Yeah, meshes can be duplicated, but it would be like tiling a real floor. You’d have to lay each tile (or block of tiles) carefully, (removing duplicate vertices), and you’d have to trim the tiles when you got to the edge of the room and there wasn’t a perfect fit.
You can duplicate (clone would be the best, alt-d) in object mode as well… And should the tiles not fit, you can simply duplicate (shift-D in this case) the object, and modify it so that it does. Or, you can simply scale it in one direction if the detail on the tile allows it, without appearing stretched.
I don’t think it’s that much more work.