Normal To Color#
Normal To Color outputs surface normals as a normal map. It is mainly meant to bake surface normals to normal map textures using AOVs and UV baking. For more information on UV baking please refer to UV Baking.
The general idea is to plug Normal To Color to an AOV Store either at render scene or material level to properly export normal information as a normal map. The texture operator defines 2 attributes Normal Mode and Space Mode which control the output.
Normal Mode#
Normal Mode defines which surface normal should be output as a normal map.
| Normal Mode | Description |
|---|---|
| Flat | Return the geometric normal of the surface fragment. When applied to a polymesh or when using displacement, this mode returns the real surface normal of the geometry. |
| Smooth | Return the smooth normal of the surface fragment. When applied to polymesh or when using displacement, this mode returns the smoothed/interpolated surface normal of the geometry. |
Space Mode#
Space Mode defines the space of the normal.
| Normal Mode | Description |
|---|---|
| Tangent | Return the normal in tangent space. |
| Object | Return the normal in object space. Unlike Tangent Space, Object Space normals are not defined between 0.0 and 1.0. They can contain negative values. |
