[xNormal - PS CS5] Plugin randomly deciding not to work anymore!! WTF?

Shuriken UK

EZ all, I've just been doing some texturing so I can finally bring some of my other models to life. The program I used to use for making normal maps and other shader maps was Crazy Bump, but because of their ridiculous pricing, I decided to go with xNormal. Although its about as basic as it gets, and you cant even control the depth of the normals (that I know of), its ALWAYS worked perfectly, or as I expected it to. I've been using it for nearly a year now without problems, but just out of the blue, a few minutes ago, it straight up refused to render a normal map and now it just keeps giving me this error:-

"Could not complete the Height2Normals command because of a problem with the filter module interface"

Whats all this about? Why the random unexplained seizure!? Now I cant create normals anymore FFS!!

Can anyone help me out here?

Thanks!

Ace-Angel

Reinstall maybe?

Also, nVidia has it's own Normal Map filter, same like XNormal, check them out as backup.

cptSwing

can't say anything about your plugin problems (works with CS5 here), but there are other options:

http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop

and the superb predecessor to ndo2, http://quixel.se/nDo1/

Shuriken UK

Thanks for the suggestions! I've actually got the nVidia plugin, I forgot to mention it lol, but it usually causes PS to crash for me (when I try to use the 3D preview). I'll check out ndo2 aswel, as I haven't got that one.

Strangely enough, when I merged all the required layers and exported them into a fresh project, it worked. I thought maybe it was a memory choke or something, but I have 4gigs lol, and atleast a gig and a half left on my system drive (I guess thats... pretty low actually).

JamesWild

Check your mode - nVidia's plugin will only accept RGB8 even if you're passing it greyscale to make a heightmap. Also if you have a blank area of an empty layer selected, that screws with so many tools in PS it's quite ridiculous for what is meant to be a professional tool. (mostly spouting "Program error" messages at random times)