iRay and Normal Maps not being expressed (Help please)

jjsc8343_fd812670fb

For some of my freelance work I've been using Vray and Mental Ray for about four years. I've also used Daz products exported to 3ds Max for rendering. I used models with custom textures in scenes created in 3ds max.

Today I decided to try IRay inside Daz3d. I've been really impressed with some of the renders that I've seen and was hoping maybe it could be a time saver. I think it could be, except I cannot get my normal maps to have any effect.

This is what I did- I use Substance Painter 2.3 (just got my 2.5 upgrade today) and used the Daz3d export preset.

Set Base Mixing to PBR Metallicity/Roughness

Metallic---->Metallicity (1.00)

Diffuse Map ---> Base Color (1.00)

Glossiness -----> Glossy Reflectivity (1.00)

Roughness -----> Glossy Roughness (1.00)

Normal ----> Normal Map (1.00)

The color and glossiness came out pretty much exactly that I wanted, but I get nothing from the normal map.

The texture from the normal map should be a spikes, so it's pretty obvious that I'm not getting anything.

I've also tried converting the normal to a greyscale and using it in the bump slot, still nothing.

What am I missing here?

Richard Haseltine

jjsc8343_fd812670fb said:

For some of my freelance work I've been using Vray and Mental Ray for about four years. I've also used Daz products exported to 3ds Max for rendering. I used models with custom textures in scenes created in 3ds max.

Today I decided to try IRay inside Daz3d. I've been really impressed with some of the renders that I've seen and was hoping maybe it could be a time saver. I think it could be, except I cannot get my normal maps to have any effect.

This is what I did- I use Substance Painter 2.3 (just got my 2.5 upgrade today) and used the Daz3d export preset.

Set Base Mixing to PBR Metallicity/Roughness

Metallic---->Metallicity (1.00)

Diffuse Map ---> Base Color (1.00)

Glossiness -----> Glossy Reflectivity (1.00)

Roughness -----> Glossy Roughness (1.00)

Normal ----> Normal Map (1.00)

The color and glossiness came out pretty much exactly that I wanted, but I get nothing from the normal map.

The texture from the normal map should be a spikes, so it's pretty obvious that I'm not getting anything.

I've also tried converting the normal to a greyscale and using it in the bump slot, still nothing.

What am I missing here?

Does the normal map work elsewhere? Which format is it - OpenGL or DirectX?

jjsc8343_fd812670fb

Works perfect in Vray 3.4. I've tried both OpenGL and DirectX formats. I've also used a 16 bit Tiff, and 8 Bit and 16 Bit PNG. None of them worked in Daz Iray, all of them worked in Vray.

I keep going through the settings thinking there is something I've accidently switched off, but I am at a total loss.

I'm going to look through my library for a premade texture that uses normals and see what happens.

Richard Haseltine

Normals certainly were working - I haven't tried recently, but I don't think it was pre 4.9.3.166 that I had a blitz on old PC items covnerting the displacement maps to normals in Substance Designer and rendering them successfully.

jjsc8343_fd812670fb

After much back and forth and trying different things, it was a Substance Painter issue. Not sure what happened to it, but I guess SP over the past couple of days started spitting out bad normal maps. Upgrading to 2.5 fixed it and now Iray is rendering fine with the OpenGL normals.

Normal maps generated a week ago worked fine (once I remembered that I had some from a week ago). Nothing I did the past two days worked in IRay.

Not sure why Vray didn't care. Everything worked there. Good, Bad, and Ugly.

Thank you for your input Richard. Always appreciate help.

Richard Haseltine

I expect VRay (or the host applciation) uses a different I/O library from DS, so one might well choke on a minor format quirk that the other accepted.