Material Color Blend not impacting 'Normal' Channel

[reidbaker]

Not sure what's going on, going through the tutorial series for SD4 with SD5. I've noticed when in the video 'Exposing Parameters...', that while the base color, roughness, and even metallic, are impacted by the Material Color Blend node when adding the Ground Dirt Mask, it doesn't seem to be doing anything with the Normal channel.

In the picture below the parameters are for the Material Color Blend Node, and the 2D view is of the final Normal Map, lacking any modifications from the dirt mask of the material color blend... What's up here? And again, the other channels are fine.

[michael_11]

Hi,

have you tried doubleclicking the height intensity and type in some higher value like 20?

it took me a while to learn, that especially for normal mapping in Substance Designer it is often required to go way beyond 1 to create visible changes.

[reidbaker]

I've not tried that but I will.

That would be a really obtuse solution considering it's a slider of 0-1... Part of me hopes your suggestion doesn't work since that scares me for what else the software may have in store like that... whoa.

Also like everything else I keep running into - the SD4 tutorials functioned within the 0-1 parameters on these particular areas.

[Nicolas LIATTI]

I forwarded the thread to our SD5 Product Manager so he can have a look.

[michael_11]

I tried it out - the normal channel seems not to work in the material color blend node in SD 5, I´ve submitted a bug report

[reidbaker]

I tried switching the height setting to 20. Didn't work - so it appears to be a bug.

[Sergei]

Also I have a problem with normal map using B2M 3.0.1 inside SD 5.0.1. The default B2M lite node generates a normal map as usually, but the one which is from standalone generates nothing, but a flat normal color. Though B2M 3 works great as a standalone and as a SD node in previous 4 version. So I think it's something broken inside SD 5.

[Nicolas Wirrmann]

Hi!
The Material Color blend requires both the normal AND the height map to be supplied. Otherwise the parameters won't have any effect.

Nicolas