Houdini: bumpmap and normal map

[thinkinmonkey]

Hi all,

I'd like to know what you think about this.

Actually I'm working a lot with ZBrush, I'm sculpting some assets to import in Houdini for rendering, this is an example:

After the sculpt session, I import in Houdini the low poly version of the new jersey and the normal map obtained by ZBrush, but some days ago I noticed some artifacts, so today I made a simply scene: a grid with a material, a light and a camera.

This is the normal map I projected on the grid:

The final render is: but if you compare it with Blender render:

you can see the Houdini render is not as expected.

I've created a very simple shader:

As suggested here: http://learning3dfromscratch.blogspot.com/2009/06/zbrush-to-houdini-texture-and-normal.html

So, the question is: what am I doing wrong? is it my fault? or does Houdini uses normal maps in different way?

What do you use in a final render for animation/vfx bump maps or normal maps?

Really thanks in advace.

normalMap_Blender.hipnc

[malexander]

The bumpmap VOP takes the derivative of the texture map, so it's not what you want. Just use a regular texture VOP and pipe that into your normal. If the texture map's range is 0-1 (which is what it looks like) then you'll need to map that to -1 to 1 first, and then possibly normalize.