Rendering normal buffer in max?

ImSlightlyBored

Hi guys
This seems like max 101 here, all I'd like to do is get out a copy of the normal buffer when rendering in max. I'm using default scanline. I only really use max for making FX textures so at the moment I'm not concerned about the best renderer, and almost out of prinicpal I don't really want to have to try out Vray, etc as I thought this is something that should be quite easy?

Can't see it listed under render elements. The other thing I tried was using a DX shader to just display the normals (thanks, Ben Cloward) but of course that can't be rendered?

Cheers

Brendan

You're after world space normals, right? This'll probably cause people to baulk, but can you cheese it with red, green and blue directional lights?

Frankie

I guess it's not helpful but just in case, render elements from the render setup tab lets you get the zdepth from a render.

ImSlightlyBored

@Brendan - that's certainly something to consider (as I am looking for world space normals) as a last resort, I was really hoping for some nice quality normals
@Frankie - yeah I've seen that, again a last resort really I guess I could run the zdepth through crazybump or something else, again, i was hoping for the accuracy of the actual normals but it seems a little difficult to set up.

cheers guys

cw

If you are rendering normal maps for vfx, have you tried render to texture?

ImSlightlyBored

I'd not considered that! I'm guessing you can just render an anim as normal through rtt?

Frankie

RTT spits out all the images from a frame range if you have one setup, but I've only had it enabled as a mistake so haven't used it deliberately.

If you did a zbuffer a one of the nvidia or xnormal photoshop plugins should work just as well as crazy bump as you don't need to try and extract values from a diffuse texture to get an approximation of heigh values, then you could possibly setup an action in photoshop... and make sure you save the output at the highest bpp possible. It does sound like a hassle, I'm also suprised max didn't have normal in the render elements?

LoTekK

You won't be able to bake down the normals per se via the dx shader, but you can use the vertex shader to transform the output to UV space in the viewport. After which you can use

gw.setPos 0 0 2048 2048 (2k x 2k, for example);
img = gw.getViewportDib();
img.filename = bmpPath + bmpFilename + ".bmp";
save img;

rs3d

Just download the John Burnett's InfoTexture Material from maxplugins.de, this gives you some options.

SpeCter

Why not use the RenderToTexture and choose WorldSpace as Normal Map Space?

ImSlightlyBored

I'm probably going to try all of these ideas, but I've just tried InfoTexture and that was exactly what I was looking for, and it works great. Cheers guys!

It still feels like there should be a way to output the normal buffer by default, it seems a bit odd.