its just re-ranged to 0:1 and will be expanded back out when it's sampled by the shader - exactly the same as a normal map just divide the resultant [-1:1] vector by 2 and add 0.5
Looking for a way to process a 24bit texture such that the red and green channels will be normalized within a -1 to 1 range, and not include the blue channel. What does the Normal Normalize node do? I guess it’s only normalizing 0-1 ? This is intended for an anisotropy texture. But I guess the same process would be needed…
Yep, exactly Make sure your pixel processor is set to absolute color depth of 16f or 32f or it will clamp all the values In the function between 0 and 1.
Looking through the spec suggests png can theoretically support signed values but I don't think I've ever seen it done and I'd be surprised if most exporters support it. you'd probably want to use tiff or exr (possibly .HDR) as a source format to store the numbers. it'd need compressing to a gpu friendly format that…
the specific output settings should be handled by the plugin although if you set absolute parameters (eg. bit-depth/dimensions) in the graph they will carry through assuming the plugin supports them. Only the pixel processor itself needs to be 16f/32f in this case - what goes in and out can be handled as normal 8/16bit…