I’ve been toying around with the idea of paint on a grayscale bump map in the viewport and converting it into a normal map through Blender’s nodes and mixed into an existing normal map, in order to be able to paint high-frequency detail on a model without actually sculpting or adding geometry.
However, I’m having trouble getting the texture nodes to show up in the viewport. Is this an issue with Blender 2.53 not being able to render results from the node editor in realtime?
Here’s the node setup I have right now, maybe I’m doing something wrong.
Here’s another test of a subdivided plane with a displacement map that’s been scribbled on in the viewport.
It kind of sucks at the moment since the texture doesn’t update to the Displace modifier in realtime, but I guess this isn’t what it was designed to do. Plus if you wanted to do it this way, the sculpting brushed would get you better results anyway.
Looks great - you do not need to use rgb for nor, black and white works fine as long as you are ok with the detail being added normal to the virtual face. May I also suggest that you test different levels of filter size in the texture image sampling tab under normal map. It essentially lets you blur nor at a distance which is necessary to prevent speckle in animations but also takes out some details. The best news is that you can use f-curves to animate this value now as needed.
Plus if you wanted to do it this way, the sculpting brushed would get you better results anyway.