HELP - Blender viewport bump map painting

Snowfly

I've been toying around with the idea of paint on a grayscale bump map in the viewport and converting it into a normal map through Blender's nodes and mixed into an existing normal map, to be able to paint high-frequency detail on a model without actually sculpting or adding geometry, just like in Modo and Sculptris.

Here's an example of the functionality I'm trying to mimic: [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFzgy5mrvh4[/ame]

However, I'm having trouble getting the texture nodes to show up in the viewport. Is this an issue with Blender 2.53 not being able to render results from the node editor in realtime?

Here's the node setup I have right now, maybe I'm doing something wrong.



...and here's a bunch of textured cubes. The blank one is the problematic one.


Could someone point me in the right direction with this experiment? I'm fairly new to Blender, and might be missing something obvious.

Snowfly

Here's another test of a subdivided plane with a displacement map that's been scribbled on in the viewport.



It kind of sucks at the moment since the texture doesn't update to the Displace modifier in realtime, and it's still reliant on how subdivided your geometry is...but I guess this isn't what it was designed to do.

Av7xrocker97

you can't do anything node-based in the viewport I'm pretty sure. Yet again I haven't gotten into nodes too much... but yeah, nodes are a more render-based thing. You also can't viewport bump map paint. Sorry. I know you could use texture paint and use only black and white, plug that bump map into your material and render it, but it isn't realtime.

Snowfly

Boo. I thought as much. It's also not possible to paint to multiple images at once, let alone set the brush to affect each image differently either (i.e. if you wanted to paint diffuse, spec, and bump info at once) so I guess I'll let this pipe dream go for now.

Thanks!

Michael Knubben

You could look into the nodebased programming work done by this guy? http://phonybone.planetblender.org/

As I understand it, it places nearly no constraints on what nodes can be used for.