Tangent space baking via Nodes

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nodes.gifEven though recently Tangent space normal map baking was added as a feature to the next version of Blender. This functionality is only available in special builds. I know many use only the official 2.45 build for production purposes. With that in mind you’d be without Tangent space normal map baking. Its possible you missed a solution provided at Blenderartists.

I won’t go into the details on how it works. You can find that at the Blenderartist’s thread.Its great that Tangent space baking will be available in the next version, thanks to the developers, but its also great we have a community that can make it work with what we have. Thanks community!

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    • http://blenderclan.org Traven

      This is a great work of my friend Zelouille. I’m really happy to see his work is appreciated. There is also a tutorial in french : http://blenderclan.tuxfamily.org/html/modules/content/?id=117

      enjoy ^^

    • Felix_Kütt

      indeed this is a cool node setup, its actually sad that this was not mentioned earlier(or was in) here. :/

    • Felix_Kütt

      oops, typo: or was it*

    • http://membres.lycos.fr/bobois/index_anglais.html IamInnocent

      Felix,
      the thread on BA is actually 3 months old.

      Not to denigrate the work of Zebouille in any manner but I’d like to point out that using the SVN is perfectly safe for some operation. Read me well, I said s-o-m-e operations. Normal map baking is one of them since the end product is a normal map that version 2.45 can use.
      So model a low poly in 2.45, sculpt a high poly in 2.45, save all that.
      Open in SVN, bake the normal, pack the texture.
      Return to 2.45 to use the normal map.
      Perfectly safe.

      Jean

    • http://www.falgor.net Falgor

      I think the SVN trunk is pretty stable for the baking part. And you’d only have to bake the models once, since the 2.45 does SUPPORT tangent space normal maps.

    • Fax

      > Return to 2.45 to use the normal map.
      > Perfectly safe.

      “Everything is safe… Perfectly safe.” (cit.)

    • pKrime

      Yeah, using the SVN like it was an external app is perfectly safe, so making a bake or an autorig and then coming back to stable isn’t dangerous at all.

      By the way, this node setup still is very useful in order to study the node system.

    • http://membres.lycos.fr/bobois/index_anglais.html IamInnocent

      Hey Fax LOL

      I didn’t think that anyone would catch it. :)