I am having issues with normals in this scene. I have searched high and low and am unable to find a resolution for this except for reducing the normal strength in the shader.
Thanks for your help!
Edit: no thumbnail
***andrewg.us
Can I see the source map you are using?
And how does it look with just a normal map feeding a diffuse shader?
Looking at it a bit longer first, I would say trying using a vector math node set to normalize to see if that issue keeps happening , But with the example with the arrow at the lower right It makes me think that some of your issue may be between your tangent map output and the fresnel node you are using to drive the mix node.
Unfortunately it looks the same feeding the fresnel as it does without. Map (baked from ocean modifier, not direct output from “ocean bake”):
Full map setup, without normal affecting fresnel:
A few tries at resolving issue:
have you tried using a seperate normal map (Using the same normal texture) for the glossy but set to a lower strength, maybe between 0.5 and 0.9?
Also, are you using a HDR as you’re world lighting so that there is a decent light source for the glossy shader to reflect?
Is a blend file possible?
What I want to say is happening is that with the ether the first white and black glossy mix is the issue (As it seems the problem black area’s have a pure white circle around them) , Or it is an artifact between the fresnel and mix nodes being daisy-chained together. Maybe try swapping in an IOR or seeing if this still happens when you remove them and just try them on mix.
Lowering to .4/.5 works pretty well, and leaves me with something I can fairly easily photoshop, but I’m still getting this backfacing.
I will probably strip down the scene and upload.
Am thinking about just turning this normal map into a bump map and being done with it.
So I decided to just deal with it and adjust in Photoshop with select color, content aware fill and noise reduction.
Clouds took waaaay too long to render, but turned out OK. 9 days @ 6000px wide, 600 samples (cloud layer only). I still have a cloud rendering that is going in front of the sun to give it a little more interest.
Not quite done, but close. I cropped this image a bit from the full res, wanted to focus more on the sun.
I call it Sun Splash.
I tried to do the splash with the fluid sim but couldn’t get the scale of the splash right, so I just modeled it (lathe with displace+particles).