I followed Ryan King Art’s tutorial on creating procedural tree bark, but I ran into an issue with the first bump node. It didn’t work as expected. While it displayed correctly in the material preview, it did not render properly in the final output or anywhere else. I’m not sure why this is happening. I have attached a screenshot of Blender, and the other is a render.
Let me be the first to welcome you to the community, @1TSnaker!
I’ve got good news! Your Bump Node is working correctly! Hear me out…you use the Bump Node to mathematically alter the surface normals of your geometry to give the appearance of added geometric detail (without actually having to either have the added geometry or model the detail).
The tutorial you are following has you actually do both - add detail through manipulating the surface normals and add a large amount of geometry via the Subdivision Surface Modifier and displace the geometry with a Displacement Node. When you read through the manual about Displacement, it actually cautions against this “both” method when using Cycles on highly subdivided meshes due to the diminishing returns. See the link below.
Now, you say that it rendered properly in the material preview but not in the Rendered View, but I say it is the same! The rear of the sphere in the material preview has a perfectly smooth, black crescent that is in shadow - exactly like your sphere in the 3D Viewport. The main difference is that when you are in Rendered View in the Viewport, you have not added any lights to your scene, so your sphere is completely in shadow. Add a light and see how that changes your sphere’s shading!
If that doesn’t help, please let us know!
See the manual page on Displacement here:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/materials/components/displacement.html#displacement
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