I want a normal-only shader that I can assign to a plane and then place that plane over other meshed (a decal, essentially) It'd be great for various types of damage - cracks, dents, edge decals etc I basically want the diffuse, for example, to not exist. I don't mean black, I mean non existent - or at least…
I stopped to use MAx for rendering anything long ago so my memory is a bit in fog about it but my guess you should be able to render uv or just normal AOV whatever MAx calls it nowadays . I mean you render the normals AOV before deacals then normal AOV of decals only and then composite it back together in 2d compositor .…
I use Octane render . They added a kind of buffers compositing straight into the render itself but it's so convoluted I never went deep into it really , Out of box it seems also can't render the normal only untill it's a part of underlying material itself . So perhaps you should look for a way how to project decal normals…
Maybe in Unreal but not in our game , we always need some base color with alpha . I asked programmer why and he told me decals are rendered into its own buffer then use the buffer alpha to mix over . Without diffuse color it would be just black background . So my guess it's not that common. But in Vray my guess you should…