Bump to Tangent Normals

From TechSlop

Bump maps are good. But I recently came across a problem that made bump maps not so good. As it turns out, sampling and converting to tangent normals in 3DS Max was the problem. So I cut out the middle man by converting greyscale bumps to tangent normals myself. Lo and behold, the badness that I was getting with bumps went away. I was happy again.

What this does it take the Red channel of the bump map and convert it to tangent normals. It does this by treating the R channel as a mesh. In doing this, there is the question of scale. As it turns out, some of the scaling is good for tweaking. I call one of the scaling methods Fine and the other Gross. They basically have the same net effect, but they seem good as-is.

Not all things with tangent normals are always the same. So I chucked in some options. These are basically what to do with the R and G channels of the output. However, what is done with the B channel seem fairly universal, so I didn't include B in these options.

One thing to note is that the Preview is accurate only when zoomed at 100%.

Download

PC/Win
Filename: TS3D_bump2tangentnormals.8bf
Filter > Tech Slop 3D > Bump to Tangent Normals
Supported Modes: RGB 8-bit
Download: TS3D_bump2tangentnormals.zip (http://tech-slop.serveit.org/plugs/TS3D_bump2tangentnormals.zip)

Connected

• Adobe Photoshop
• Photoshop Plug-ins