Bake normal map based on diffuse in Cycles?

Hi everyone,

In BI, you could do this:

• Create a new material and add a diffuse image texture to it (say a wood grain)
• Set that texture to influence the normal
• Assign the material to a plane and unwrap it
• Bake a normal map that would incorporate the influence from the diffuse

Is it possible to repeat this feat is Cycles? My efforts so far have failed – the geometry is of course reflected (fairly dull for a plane) but I cannot seem to find a way of incorporating the “bump” from the diffuse.

TIA

You can workaround that using a bump node and conecteit to a separete XYZ node the reconect to a Combine RGB and then conectit to a emision shader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow2cDaivDVo follow this tutorial and bake in cycles to the uv map, Although you might want to do some mods to world tab to give it an ambient occlusion and use a normal to manually set your shadow with it to add to your bump node when you bake it.

But if you have a source image and you just want some bump with out the hassle of bakes. from the vector selection when you add a node just add in a ‘bump’ node. And if need be you can do some playing around with some other color change nodes to tweek what you get. I’ll output the bump node to the colour sometimes to bake out my own normal maps.

Thanks for replying – I don’t quite understand, I don’t think… would you able to post a screenshot of your node tree?

TIA

Thanks for replying. Your last step has me a little confused… feeding the output from the Bump node directly into the color input of the diffuse shader does not produce a correct normal map, as far as I can tell?