Ben, yes. The only difference is axis transformation between apps/engines. But as long as the WS normal map matches the mesh (reset xform/freeze/wtv), it should be fine. You will be able to output a WS map from any app, including xnormal. I might have some news this weekend.
I did the "local space" to "custom tangent space" conversion, for the reason that local space will be the same for all (unless uv-sampling interpolants are also different in scanline). Then you can transform the normal into your custom space... ideally you would do this with high precision local normals... but anyway from…
Eld, nope, object space are completely usable on rigged/deformed meshes, and while transformed in the world aswell. It's just a matter of looking at the correct reference and work from there. It's less straightforward than tangent (from a thinking process point of view) but in code its not heavier. Some programmers just…
that's not true, you can have animated local-space normal maps just fine, even organic deformations (BF2 used this). I think this myth will prevail so, no matter how often people state the opposite. Think about this, if you lighting happens in world space, then you must turn your tangent-space normal to world-space to do…
there is infinite possibilities... besides the main part of the tangent basis is done when setting up vertices and their attributes of the mesh itself. Shader authors can't do much about that, the "in shader" you lack most information you need (e.g. triangle information). I am afraid it isn't as simple as doing stuff in…
Thanks a lot for the good read, guys. This has been a very helpful thread. I'd like to share what I have learned from it - and this is mostly aimed at people who are writing FX shaders for the Max viewport: The standard way (the method that I have used and many others) to create a normal vector from a tangent space normal…