mental ray render with normalmaps?

airbrush

Does anyone know how to set up a mental ray render with normalmaps.
I've setup the shader the standard way...normal bump in the bump slot and turned up the value to 100.
The render comes out flat, is there a shader for this?

Mark Dygert

Pardon the troll like nature of my question(s) but we should cover the basics first.

- Inside the Normal Bump material which slot did you put the actual map?
- How did you create your normal map?
- What does the map look like?
- There isn't anything special you need to do with MR to get normal map to render out.
- Are you trying to get the normal to show up in the viewport?

IxenonI

What programm are you using?

airbrush

it is working...removed the diffuse and rendered, the normal is just very faint for some reason even though the intensity of it is quite high, i turned up the additional bump value in the normal bump and now its fine.

Murdoc

From what I remember if your using Maya 8 or below they never rendered out properly, it was like they were just using it as a bump, even if you change it to tanget space; there is a hack plugin node, but it then blows out your spec.

MoP

Sounds like Max, not Maya.

TWilson

Yea sounds like max if I had to guess ...you're probably just plugging the NM into the bump slot when you need to be switching the bump slot to the NM option which will give you an extra layer.

If it's in Maya ...well maya should render it just fine if you're using a phong or blinn and have it connected as a bump map in tangent.