Hey all, Trying to use vertex animation tool for some particle effects I’m working on and wondering if there’s any way to use a baked normal map on a mesh using a vertex animation material. linked pic is an example material just wondering where I would plug in a normal map if its even possible.
Thanks,
Emilio ‘Pariah’ Carrillo
it depends a bit. You should actually (usually) disable tangent space normals on materials using the vertex animation matfunct.
that is because generally the matfunct. uses world position normals to --per frame-- change the normal map so it still looks fine regardless of the animation/rotation on the mesh caused by the vertex animation.
this results in a few oddities though, you cant really properly apply either a world or tangent space normal to the mesh, even when multiplying/adding the additional normal map to the output of the matfunct and normalizing it.
that said, depending on the animation, you can often forfeit the entire normal map input of the matfunct. and just plug in your regular normal map into the “normal” slot.
If the mesh is rotating/morphing though this might result in inaccurate normals. but again, depending on the kind of mesh it might not be a problem. you can try to multiply or add the vertex normal texture, or use the “BlendAngleCorrectedNormals” node, but I cant guarantee a proper normal map result.
thanks Luos for confirming what i already thought, nut since you’re here any chance you help figure out how to randomize where the meshes start their animations so when you’re spawning multiple meshes from a single emitter they’re not synchronized, (insert standard fan boy comments here, love your work/tuts/toolkit/etc…)
Thanks,
Emilio ‘Pariah’ Carrillo
you can use a “dynamic” node in the mat-editor and the “parameter” node in cascade to talk to said dynamic node. with it you can make something spawn with a random value between 0-1. if you use that as a lerp for X amount of frames in the vertex anim matfunct you should be able to do just that.
also, thanks for the kind words 
(and be sure to set my answer as “accepted”
I ve thought about this as well, It might be possible but you d have to do a lil expression to convert your tangent space map to a world space mostly adding or something along those lines the vertex normal to your pixel normal. I could be way off though, I ve had a rough time getting results out of this thing from different versions of max
