Hi,

I've included a file where, if rendered and the extra planes are observed, the shading normal (N) output gives me a bizarre orange(R+G?) with gray(?) background while the attribute normal (normal) gives me what I expect, flat red with black background. In fact, if I plug the N into my normal parameter in the shop it too will render orange and gray.

I have searched but found no documentation on shading normal vs. surface normal and I was wondering why does it render orange with gray and not red with black?

Thank You,

/ross

There is no attribute called ‘normal,’ unless you created a custom attribute with this name (polyframe sop may also do so.) Bound attributes are not transformed into shading (camera) space by the material, so if anything global N and bound N may differ in that regard. The other more visual effect is the value remapping that the image viewer (mplay/render view) does for image planes with specific names, ‘N’ being one of them. If you have an image plane called ‘N’ or ‘Pz’ mplay auto-fits the values to a range that is visible on screen, since both of these channels often have values outside the 0-1 range. This effect is only for display and does not affect the value as used in the shader/exported to the image plane.

Yes, I exported an extra image plane called normal using the vector attribute normal, but you are right, mplay was fitting the range, I didn't even see that.

Thanks!