Rendering a Normal Pass for use with After Effects ‘Normality’

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right-pass2A quick and easy solution on how to render a Normal Pass out of Blender that will work with the ‘Normality’-plugin in After Effects. Blend file included.

William Patin writes:

If you ever try to render out a Normal Pass out of Blender, you’ll be wondering why the normals look some kind of strange. The ‘problem’ is that Blender renders a Normal Pass using the ‘World’ as default Normal Space. Since ‘Normality’ is using the Tangent Normal Space, this is how we’re going to convert our Normal Pass to make it compatible.

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    • Artorp

      Nice one, is useful for a lot more than for only AE’s “normality” I’m sure.

    • Alexander Blank

      Ditto

    • migero

      i already know this trick for use in animated normal maps

    • http://www.youtube.com/robbielosee Robbie Losee

      Who needs normal maps in the age of the GPS?

      Just kidding. I can’t wait to check this out.

    • http://www.virtualmatter.org Kevin

      Yeah, I’ve been fixing this in the nodes for a while. I really wish Blender would output standard normal maps, along with correctly oriented multilayer exr files. It would make the pipeline much easier.

      Guess I should start learning C.

      Anyways, Normality is a great plugin and this is a really nice fix for Blender. Good job.

      –
      Kevin

    • Robert Kent

      Andrew Kramer did a tutorial on normals recently – check out http://www.videocopilot.net/

    • http://www.svingo.com Christian Lehmann

      I just took a look at normality — and I really liked it. Since it’s basically free I will use it in my next project. Testing and changing the lights is so much easier now. Thanks for the info. Regards, Christian

    • yellow

      2nd Kevins wish for fixed multilayer exr output from blender. Not only AE has problems but importing into Nuke results in having to add a mirror transformation to get blenders exrs the right way round.

      Also multilayer exr import into blender from Modo or VRay for example, the Image composite node ignores any layers it doesn’t recorgnise, it would be cool if it just added a connection point with a default name if it can’t read the layer names.

      It would be impressive to see blender able to play with other apps rather than expecting it to be the other way around all the time. :-)

      Great to see progress William.

      **EDIT** Woot just used the edit post option. :-)

    • Leonardo

      I just used it – worked like a charm. Thanks for the tutorial – Normality is a sweet plugin.

      ~ Leo