mentalray

Hi there, don't know if this is a newbie question or not therefore I posted here. Up to now I do not had any issues with normal maps. As I get more and more deeper involved into 3dcoat I try to do more and want to paint my own normal maps rather than using bitmap batterns or perlin noise. Problem is that I have visible seams on map. Think about putting a hammer onto a large metal surface. You get a small hard spot and than a way long small disortions. Now you want to repair that destruction. It will get more smooth but it will not entirely perfect. Or think about a metal plane with is being hold by a hard frame where you can see small bumps all the way except where the structure holds the metal. Hope you have an idea what I am after. Okay, the way I try to achive is doing a new layer with a standard material and paint just small dots on the normal layer. Afterwards I hold the shift key while painting and smoothen the normal structure, finer and finer. When the result is done I decrease the layer opacity for bump to about 20% - it must be very very thin. The result now is that it seems to be too thin. Within the attached image I hope you can see that. There are just areas of one rgb value f.e. 81,81,81 and later on 82,82,82. As far as I understand this is the smallest value within a 256 greyscale, but a normal map is rgb. Why do I have no access to this? Within my exterior application it looks the same, just small amount of a normal change, not the effect I wanted. Can't this be done more precise? Is my workflow the wrong? Is there another way to achive the result I want to have? Do I have to use displacement to be more precise?

The window is gone where I can scale, rotate and move the material which can be found in the middle of the screen. Please help.

ah ok. thought about this too.

How to move the users folder out of documents to some other place?

I am sure I did this once but I can't find the solution any more. How to decrease the size of the smart material previews images where I can select them?

Yeah I am aware of it. But this would force me to detach all elements within an object as separate objects which is additional work. Therefore I am asking to paint an element in the software by a clic. An object can have of multiple elements. Do four boxes, attach them as one object and import them. It is easy to paint on of it but it will be hard if you get more complex and overlapping.

Hi there, is there any way to paint/erase an element inside an object? With element I mean faces which are connected (like the element key inside 3dsmax)? Thanks