[SOLVED] Normal Map Colors

Troubleshooting
1

Whenever I add a normal map to a terrain, I can notice the effects in the editor, but can barely see a difference in my game. I looked at this thread Normal Maps for Terrain won't work - #10 by Sploreg and many others, and it looks like It’s probably something I’m doing wrong. I’ve noticed lots of examples where terrain appears to have nice depth, but I can’t seem to figure it out.

I’m using an ambient light and a dim directional light so it’s night time in my game. If I make the direcitonal light brighter, the normal for the terrain show up a little better, but never as well as the normal maps on my other geometries. I also don’t know whats the proper way to generate the tangents for a terrain. If I call TangentBinormalGenerator.generate() in my code, it makes the terrain take much longer to load, but the only other way I’ve generated tangents is per Geometry in the editor, which would take a long time for my 1024 size terrain I have right now.

I also noticed in the documentation about baking, there’s a section about “fixing the normal colors in blender,” I was about to try doing this and see if I get better results, but I never used the blender node editor and got stuck trying to find the nodes used in the example on this page https://jmonkeyengine.github.io/wiki/jme3/external/blender.html#fixing-the-normal-colors-in-blender

Sorry if I’m all over the place with my question here, I’ve pretty much just been confused trying to get the most out of normal maps and baking. Thanks

2

In the bottom left corner of 3dviewport there is a white box, select it and change to node editor.

In the Node Editor header you will notice next to the Node menu are 3 buttons that when hovered over show Shader Nodes, Compositing Nodes, Texture Nodes. Shader Nodes requires a material and Texture nodes requires a texture.

For this part of the wiki document,
Here is Blender Node example. It fixes the normal colors:

Select the Node Tree Type: Compositing Node and click the checkbox “Use Nodes”.

Under Add menu located in the Node Editor header you will see the Search menu item. Click it and enter the word Image or browse the menu items to find Image.

Select Image and it will attach a Image node to your cursor.

Place it where you want and then load the image into the node using either the open button located in the node or using the browse button located next to it.

Link nodes by dragging from one nodes output socket to another nodes input socket.

Repeat these steps for any other nodes you want to add and link.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/compositing/introduction.html
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/editors/node_editor/nodes/parts.html

1 Like
3

Thanks! That cleared things up perfectly, I wasn’t noticing that there were different modes down on the bottom tab so I was just searching in material mode. I fixed one of my normal maps and it shows up way better on the terrain now