Normal Map Issues with Mental Ray

ladyxbug

This is an old challenge I finally have some time to finish up. I don't have much left to do, so I went ahead to play around with lighting. After I threw in spec, diffuse, and normal maps, I noticed that mental ray in Maya wasn't taking it well. I haven't experience so much artifacts in a render over a normal map; the last time was about 2 years ago in school, and my professor never answered why it was happening.

If anyone can explain "the why" or have an alternative, please drop in.

Thanks a bunches.

Kid.in.the.Dark

can you show us your normal map and your material setup?

Also a render of how it looks without the normal map applied

ladyxbug

I just screenshot the tree, and the bump is set to obj space normals.
Even with the option of tang. space normals, it looks like the image below, but with the zig-zag artifact.

Below is a render without normals.

Obscura

I dunno the answer, but what you have is a tangent space normalmap so it should be set to that, thats clear. As the alternatives, there are many ways to light and render your asset, like any other renderer inside maya, but actually rendering it in real time would be better if it suppose to be a game asset. You can try maya's real time rendering options (viewport 2.0?) , or toolbag2, or any of the free engines (unreal, unity, etc...). I think this would be a better direction, if you are not sticking to mental ray.