db&w Support Forum

In my never ending quest for larger (poly count), more detailed geometry in Lightwave I've been playing with normal maps. I'm wondering if anyone has come up with a good work flow for using infinimap to load a super large normal map and apply it to a model. I'm stuck because its seems lightwave's "NormalMap" node does not take any image input.

One way to solve it would be if or is there a way with infinimap to make an image loaded by infinimap appear in the image dropdown list so that I could select in in the normalMap nodes image dropdown.

Or I've been playing with the infinimap extended node thinking the "colour (Normal)" output might work somehow, but I still seem to be stuck in the fact it needs to pass through the "NormalMap" node which takes no image input.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks

Agreed, I wish that was possible. It would have also saved me from coding the 80% of infiniMap that emulate LWs image texturing ;)
That output actually interprets the infiniMap image as a bump map and outputs a vector that perturbs the normal according to the bump.

You can try the "Object Tangent" node from Denis: http://pagesperso-orange.fr/dpont/plugins/nodes/Additionnal_Nodes_2.html , this works if there is a UV map to project the normal map with.

Cheers,
Mike

P.S. native suport for normal maps is on the to do list...

Thanks for the suggestion with "Object Tangent" works beautifully. I really love infinimap, it should be on every Lightwave user's "must have" list. The new openEXR support is sweet, giant 32-bit floating point images with a small memory footprint!

Thanks a lot *blush* ... can we quote you on that ?

Cheers,
Mike

Sure, no problem. Hope it can help get the word out.  :)

Hey, me might just do that :D

Thanks and have a nice week end!

Cheers,
Mike

I don't own Infinimap (yet) but was hoping that it would work with this exact pipeline that lightwolf was hoping for as well, which is why I was thinking of buying it.

Being that there is no native support in Infinimap for Normal maps, what exactly is the "workaround" if any to get them in? In short, am I stuck on using my high resolution normal maps on my low resolution geometry the old fashioned lightwave way?

Any news when Infinimap will support normal maps just as it does the texture maps?

The workaround is to use Denis Tange Space node: http://pagesperso-orange.fr/dpont/plugins/nodes/Additionnal_Nodes_2.html
There'll be a V1.5.1 update out in a few days, once that is done I'll get to it. V1.6 should include normal map support then - hopefully in a couple of weeks.

Cheers,
Mike

Since we're talking...

I've planned to add new outputs to the extended Node to allow for the normal maps.
This would have the advantage of including support for implicit projections (i.e. spherical projection) as opposed to being limited to UV projections only.

Cheers,
Mike