Hi,

2 questions;

1. How do I create Normal and Displacement maps in Houdini?

I was wondering if there is a way to create Normal maps and Displacement maps in Houdini by baking from a hi-res model to a lo-res model, a process used in recent games. BakeAir from the AIR renderman-compliant renderer can bake normals and tangency maps from rib files. I was planning on using it to do the baking, but I would like know how to set it up in Houdini to get the normals and tangency map.

2. Can I use these maps back in Houdini?

I want to use the normal map on the bump channel and the tangency map on the displacement. Specifically, set the bump to be influence by the vector normals of the normal map and the scalar raylength on the displacement map from the height in the positive and negative direction from the tangency map. Or something like that, excuse me if I didn't say it correctly, I'm still trying to figure out how this works technically.

Here is a site that explains the process for using in Maya via Mental Ray and Renderman.

http://www.drone.org [drone.org]


Thanks,

- T

sorry but i don't have an answer for you.
i've been trying to work this out all last night but no go. i'm sure it must be doable in VOPs.
this seems to be attracting a lot of attention of late. mantra is very cool with displacements so i hope we can get this thing going….

just didn't want this thread to die.
hopefully somebody will notice…..in the meantime back to VOPs…..

Hey,

Thanks for the reply. I think I got enough of how it works to create it with VEX. Like you stated VMantra does a good job with displacement, so it is definitely worth setting up.


Regards,