i know how to render matcap or do the matertial override going to the layers panel and replace everything with a plain material, but in both cases you lose the normal information.
How can i render the model in just a single color but retain normal maps info? i’ve seen people do it a lot when presenting their characters…
I saw a wonderful tutorial that explains exactly what you want in Eevee. It shows how to adapt mat caps to work in Eevee, but I think it also works in Cycles.
in that case the red and green had the same value of color so they look similar in black and white, but it wont work with a dark brown for example or any dark color. The idea is to equalize all values and only let the shadow info affect the greyscale…
that is a matcap only solution, what im asking is to retain the normal map info from all the materials and make the color pure white for example. Im talking about cases where the bump info comes from a normal map not from a sculpted mesh.
But a matcap in Eevee doesn’t work only with sculpted meshes. It also accepts normal maps.
The matcap in this case is not global, but applied to an object as a material, so you have all. The normals, the bumps, everything.
The only problem is that you need to make a new material for every object in the scene.
Sadly, you can’t override materials and keep the normals. You need a different material for each case.
At least, I don’t know any way to do that.
Anyway, did you ever consider somehow applying the normals through compositor?
Over a clay-rendered image, I mean.
i’ve tried using the AO as base and adding the normal pass with a color ramp but no success. Also about your other response, i dont want to have to touch every material and do a new node tree. I was hoping to find a simple override solution that works in just once setting.
Because yeah i could modify all materials manually and just remove the color, but that would be insane if i had 30+ materials… to be honest even with 2, i dont like repetitive work that can be automated.
I dont understand when i see renders that have the characters all white but you can see every bump and normal detail… how do they do it? manually replacing all materials seems overkill…
Yes I realised it was a silly answer when I went out! Sorry.
Maybe they did it the hard way (editing the materials).
i guess i could build some type of “interceptor” node group that mimic the same inputs as the PBR node so i can then just edit one node and all materials using it would switch to all white… might work.
Yes you could do that but it is still a lot of work for 30 materials.
I think they are working on “overrides” I do not know how far they have got or if it will include things like base colour roughness etc
Hi Pablo,
Because each of your materials has unique normals, this info has to be included uniquely in any ‘clay’ material, the simplest solution that I could think of was to create a Node Group which takes in the PBR shader ( or whatever you primary material is using ) and the normals, then uses a driver on the Scene panel to switch between. This Node group can easily be copy/pasted into any material you’re using and wired up in seconds, so even for 30 materials it’s not backbreaking.
Additionally, though I’ve used only a basic Diffuse Shader as the clay - I’ve also wired up the colour parameter so that it too can be controlled via a driver. A more complex material could have any drivers for any parameters you like. This step is the most elaborate to setup, but not complex. I’m happy to do a step-through process if you ( or anyone else reading ) would like 
The basic set-up:
Switched to Clay:
Changing clay colour:
Cheers,
Dj.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying here and you’re looking for something more complex, but I think most clay renders are done by simply plugging the normal map and nothing else into a shader.
(Model is not mine, it’s HumanGen - that thing has fantastic normal maps)
Unless the issue here is that you want to do it automatically, without having to make new materials for each texture set yourself. That could probably be done with python, but would probably take longer to write than set up by hand and if scripting isn’t your thing, you may just have to set the materials manually - which is likely how everyone does it.
You can either copy normal map texture and nodes to duplicates of the clay material, or copy the principled shader node to a duplicate of the material and connect
If you don’t want to have to switch the materials over every time, and you’re willing to render the the clay render and fancy render in different engines, you could set it up so it automatically switches between the clay shader and fancy shader by having both in the shader, and setting one for material output > cycles, and the other for material output > eevee
can you show me the code of the drivers? i like that solution but i dont know how to extract the value from the custome properties set in the scene…
Here you go, if anything is not clear let me know.
I’m assuming that you’ve already set up the Node Group for the clay material/normal pass-through.
The use of a driver is only a convenience ( making it accessible independent of any object ) because . . .
if you copy/paste the Node Group into each of your materials they will be, by default, all linked instances, so editing the parameters within any one Node Group ( like setting the Mix Value to 1 ) will automatically change all other Node Group values to 1 for all materials that use it. Same with the colour, or indeed any other parameters your Shader might use. So if jumping into ANY material and switching values is not inconvenient it will do the job just as well.
With that said - here’s how to make the driver(s):
In the SCENES panel ( if there are already drivers present in the Custom Properties menu you can ignore them) . . .
Moving between Scene Panel and the Shader ( inside the Node Group) . . .
The outcome . . .
If you want to set up a colour driver . . .
Inside the Shader Node Group . . .
Cheers,
Dj.
Did a node only replacing the color info of all materials using the driver to switch on and off from color to just white. I think keeping the roughness, metalic and so on also helps to read the surfaces better…
