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farbrausch / fr_public

Farbrausch demo tools 2001-2011
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WZ4 Question: Yellow ops do not support Normal maps? #59

Closed Skinnytorus closed 12 years ago

Skinnytorus commented 12 years ago

Hi, I was experimenting with a simple ocean simulation and faced an unexpected problem: BlowNoise op doesn't show normal maps. I checked further and saw that all yellow ops with a mod material on input omit normal maps on output.

So, I just wanna know if this is a bug or a deliberate trick to avoid extra system load? And I wonder if it's possible to enable (or force?) normal maps for the yellow ops in the source code? Thank you.

rygorous commented 12 years ago

Sorry for taking a while to answer.

This is neither a bug nor a trick to reduce system load (for all practical purposes, normal maps are basically free these days). We use tangent-space normal mapping, which requires tangent-space basis vectors per vertex. The vertex format used in BlowNoise (and several other ops) only has a normal, not a tangent vector, and hence doesn't support normal mapping.

This is fixable, but it requires changes to the code that are a bit more substantial than simply toggling a flag. I'll add it for BlowNoise, any other ops where you want this?

rygorous commented 12 years ago

Okay, it's in. I'll close this bug, just open new issues for any other ops where you want this :)

Skinnytorus commented 12 years ago

Yey! Many thanks for that!