Why normal pass appears strange?

Hello, I want to render a normal pass of the scene using the Blender internal renderer.

The image looks strange because the colors appear like a cross shaped.


However I want to get a result more like this.

Do not worry about the color values because I have found recipes to shift the colors to proper normal ones.

However, the main problem is that I can’t get smooth values across the surface. As you can see the colors values are cut right at the middle of the surface. This causes me problems later on because I can’t deal with the lost information.

Any ideas about what’s going on?

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Great! Thanks.

Is there a way to reverse this process to convert the object space normal pass that Cycles generates to camera space, in order to do re-lighting in the compositor?

I’ve tried using the same nodes and changing the order and switching the multiply to divide and other things, but nothing seems to work, and the dot output of the normal node used on the Cycles normal pass doesn’t behave at all the same as it does with the BI normal pass.

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yyes im also trying to get this inverted result but not the original nor the inversion work for me

The “colors” you see in a Normal pass are fake. They actually represent the direction of the normal. The same data format is also used for color information.