Does anyone know if there is an easy way or any way to render out a normal map in the maya software renderer or mental ray renderer?

http://www.jeffparrott.com/normalmaptut_01.html

There's a link to a tutorial Jeff Parrott (jeffro on the forums) wrote. Hope that helps!

MoP

Mop thanks, that is a great tutorial but the problem is it only shows how to render them in real time in the viewport, I was wondering if there is a way to render the scene and have them show up.

You should be able to just apply the "Out Color" output of the normal map texture to the "Normal Camera" input of the material, like step 14 of jeffro's tut, and it should render, at least in maya software renderer. Not sure if that's how you render normal maps in mental ray, I would assume it's the same.

ndcv I tried that one tonight but it seemed to not work at all in maya software render and in mental ray it seemed to be working to some degree but looks different than I expected.

hrm... did you use maya to generate the normal maps, or some other program like Orb or ZBrush? To be honest I don't have maya 6, but I had normal maps rendering in maya 5 at some point and I THOUGHT I just hooked it up to the normal camera... I will check into this...

ahhh I had to do a little futzing around to make it work.

First I went to http://www.drone.org/tutorials/spaceChange.html and grabbed the spaceChange50.zip file - this is a utility node that lets you change between different coordinate systems. I don't see a spacechange version for 6.0, dunno if the 5.0 version will work with it or not, or if 6.0 includes something like this out of the box...

Anyhow then I opened up the shader network in hypershade.
I ran the color output of the normal map texture into a SetRange node, going from old range [0, 1] to new range [-1, 1].
Then I ran the output from that into a new SpaceChange node, setting the values as Nodestate:Normal, Operation:normal, InSpace:point, OutSpace:camera, RebuildUVN:keepU, and didn't check the "Normalize Output" checkbox.
Then the output of that node went into the Normal Camera of the texture.

If you can't get SpaceChange working in 6.0 you can change from point to camera space with a bunch of vector calculations. I don't know exactly how that works, but a picture of such a network is here: http://www.headus.com/au/samples/nor...raph2.fig.html

Hope this helps [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]