Importing Height maps or Normal maps

Started by bryjho, December 10, 2016, 05:26:28 PM

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bryjho

Hello everyone,

I am currently a student and new to terragen. I created this model in maya and I would like to import it into terragen to create a scene. I have created the texture maps including height maps and normal maps. Is there a way to import the height or normal maps into terragen? Any help would be very appreciated.

Cheers,
Bryan

Dune

Welcome to the forum, Bryan. That's a nice looking object, and I would very much like to see it in a Terragen environment. But what do you mean by height maps? In TG you can import displacement, or rather bumpmaps, as with RayTraced objects on real displacement does not alter the mesh. I don't think you would need real displacement though, bump would be enough. In the default shader you can import color, displacement and opacity maps, and vary those by adding a power fractal led through a transform shader (set to world position). I think normal maps are also used to get the bump working, but it's best to just try it out.
Bump maps can be 8-bit greyscale maps, btw.

And if you really need real displacement, you can turn on forced displacement in the object tab, but for proper functioning, the object would need enough vertices.

bryjho

Thanks Dune for responding..

Well my model is only low-poly so I have to rely on height maps or normal maps.. haven't tried using displacement maps yet as it affects the geometry itself and ruin my low-poly model. I used my normal maps and used them in the displacement slot, and I think it worked. (though I'm not really sure about this..  :P) here is a sample render that I experimented with my model..