Luxrender + Indirect lighting + normal maps?

It has to be possible. But I can’t figure it out. I’m doing a very simple scene with a floor (with a heavy normal map) an emit cube and a lamp. When I render in blender internal I don’t have the normal map either (when indirect lighting is on, it looks good but no normal).

I’m using blender 2.5.

It would be nice if it was possible, but LuxRender supports just bump maps, not normal maps. Maybe you should leave a feature request on the LuxRender forum.

Don’t you use the ‘colored mean’ option in the Luxblend25 image texture options for that when you do use normal maps, or does that just convert a normal mapped texture into a greyscale bumpmap?

Ok… well how would I go about using a greyscale bumpmap in it? I’m trying to apply one and it’s still not rendering right :expressionless:

I have reason to believe it has to do with only using mesh lights? Cause if I render in BI with only mesh lights i see no normal/bump maps. If I keep the mesh lights and add a lamp, ta dah! They appear? But in lux I never see them :frowning:

Bump maps go here (click the T, then select your texture from the menu)


Setting your texture type as “imagemap” will give you some more options compared to Blender’s “Image or Movie” texture, which is meant for BI, not Lux. For using a normal map as a greyscale bump, I THINK you would want to tell it to just sample the blue channel, since that is like a regular bump. Note that I may be horribly wrong on this, and you all should take that with several grains of salt.

Also, don’t forget to set your height, and remember that in Lux the “map height/amount” is the actual height in meters it will “push up” the normal! Normally you will be entering tiny values there, like .01 or .005.

Thanks, that helps a bit :slight_smile:

Found this thread via google, kind of graveyard, but came up as #1 result, so probably worth posting anyway.

Firstly, in Lux, use a displacement map instead of a normal map (it’s superior anyway).
You add it in Object Data.

It’s probably what you want, anyway. The value fed to displacement map is in meters (even if your global blender units are not metric).

A side note about bump maps in Lux, they are not in meters. You probably want a value of 1.

gl!

http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5280#p54886

Disp maps suck up a lot more RAM than bump/normal maps unless the mesh was subdivided that much anyway, which a floor probably isn’t.