can't paint on normal map

[Aleksey]

Is this the expected behaviour? Im trying to clean up some baking. essentiall i just want parts of the mesh to not see the normal map. 

Can anyone help?

 

 

[Carlosan]

Yes, 3dcoat dont let to paint external normal maps, is expected.

[Aleksey]

ok, but i seem to have the same problem, right after baking the high res mesh to low poly. or is it because i bake normal map instead of displacement?

[AbnRanger]

7 hours ago, Aleksey said:

ok, but i seem to have the same problem, right after baking the high res mesh to low poly. or is it because i bake normal map instead of displacement?

Yes. I don't know why that is. You can do some editing, but not much. I think Erasing the normal map pixels and maybe smoothing, but not additive painting on those maps. You have to create new layers to add new details. I really wish Andrew would change this.

[Aleksey]

cool thanks!

[LeighT]

On 10/14/2018 at 12:22 AM, Carlosan said:

Yes, 3dcoat dont let to paint external normal maps, is expected.

Hello!
Am i new 3dCoat user, so maybe i'm not aware about some features , but i have an alike question.
Ok, its not possible to edit an imported normal map.
But can i convert an imported normal map to an editable depth layer? Is there a tool or plugin that could do this or it is a fundamental architectural descision and can't be bypassed in any way?

Basically, my case is:
I have an imported concrete surface normals from external software and i would like to paint some smooth areas on it, like plastic. But as it stands now i can only multiply a base normal layer, but not override it.

Sure there are workarounds like using external software for painting those kind of details and then reimporting it back to 3dCoat, but its a very time consuming pipline. Expecially if we need to draw several channels at the same time (depth + rougness for instance).

Thanks.

 

[Carlosan]

Hi 

On Normalmap[ext] Layer, change blending mode to StandardBlend, then you can edit the map as any color layer. Not the best way but sometimes as workaround it help.

[LeighT]

5 hours ago, Carlosan said:

Hi 

On Normalmap[ext] Layer, change blending mode to StandardBlend, then you can edit the map as any color layer. Not the best way but sometimes as workaround it help.

Yes, i've tried this, but end result appears... weird.

So i've done depth manually using a mask for concrete surface(basically, its a desaturated concrete texture), so now i have an "editable normal map".

But i faced another issue.
"Replace depth" feature seemed to me as a thing that should override depth information from layers below, but in fact i have such behaviour. (screenshots included)
For some reason, only edges of the brush are ignoring depth flow lower layers.(screenshot 2)

What am i doing wrong?

 

[filatovvv]

It would be perfect if we could edit an existing normal map at the same time as painting in standard blend mode. For example, I have a terrain material consisting of an albedo and a normal map, and I need to change both textures at once with the brush. There is no problem with albedo - the new color overlaps the old one, but the normal map can only add depth to the old one, but not replace it. In this case, my only option is to use the texture of the new colored color as a mask for the new normal map texture, and the inverted one for the old normal map. :0

I found that only Shadermap can edit an existing normal map. I hope 3DC will be able to do this in the future as well.