idea #543: change the direction of baked normals

Description
Help promote this idea!

5
(+6,-1)

Written by metalliandy the 8 Nov 08 at 23:17. Category: Rendering. Status: New

Description

Currently the baked normalmaps from blender cannot be used in many other applications because the normals are baked in a different direction.

I suggest a feature to change the direction of the baked normals to allow a greater scale of use.

This image is the direction used by most applications
http://www.metalliandy.com/blender/xnormal.jpg

This image is the direction used by blender
http://www.metalliandy.com/blender/blender.jpg

(the UV's are a little different on each image)

Just a simple set of buttons to switch between the two would be great :)

Attachments

No attachments.

Duplicates

[Report a duplicate and merge its votes to this idea]

Comments

ndsguyxtreme wrote on the 5 Jul 08 at 23:53

All you have to do is invert the red and green channels.

metalliandy wrote on the 6 Jul 08 at 05:29

Thanks for the reply :)

I am aware that this can be done with image manipulation, though this all takes time to do, in which we could be doing something else.

Seeing that blender is the odd one out in this respect as most applications use y for up and down, i think its not to unreasonable to ask for this...after all blender is trying to integrate its self towards game creation now and flipping channels just adds to the awkwardness of its use and many users wont know about this fix.

I shouldn't be that hard to implement and would save time and reduce the steps needed to create a usable map.

Thanks again for the reply :)

metalliandy wrote on the 6 Jul 08 at 05:31

Also the map would need to be re-normalized to make sure that all the image normals are pointing in the right direction, otherwise this can cause problems with the normal map and with the specular map that it is possibly being used in conjunction with.