Cycles Normal Map Trick

Artwork Blender Tests
1

I was unhappy with how “flat” my cobbled street was looking so I started playing around with a normal map in Cycles. I used a normal map through “light falloff” node with a quadratic setting to factor between the cobbled street texture and a secondary colour.

This are the results. I think the stones “pop” out of the plane and make it slightly more believable. Sorry if this has been discovered before!


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2

very noticablely better.

3

You are aware that normal map functionality has already been added to trunk and will be in the next release, right?

So you will no longer need to use such a trick because you can just string it through the new normal map node into the new normal socket added to the shader nodes.