I’ve been perusing the manual and forums looking for ways to export a model with a normal map from maya. In pretty much every case, the answer is “the exporter does it for you”. That sounds pretty awesome, but when I run maya2egg85.exe on my .mb file it tells me that it “doesn’t know how to convert shader kbump 4”. Should I be using something other than a regular maya bump map? I couldn’t find any nodes in the hypershade for making a different kind of normal map than that. I’m at a loss for what I’m doing wrong here, though I know it has to be something simple.
well… I am about to face such challenge.
In fact, I can’t follow what the manual says, in the hypershade, connect the ‘outColor’ from the texture to the ‘normalCamera’ in to the phong shader. I simply can’t find the ‘normalCamera’ input.
But I’m pretty much sure that in Panda, it will require the normal map shader activation.
I must have missed that line about connecting the outColor to the normalCamera when I was reading! That’s exactly the hint I needed. The egg I just made has all the normal map info in it now, complete with computed tangents and binormals. You really helped me out there, barbeirovsk.
Since you were saying you couldn’t find the normalCamera connection, let me explain exactly what to do. In maya’s hypershade, you need to have two things set up. The first is a phong shader, and the second is an image file node with your normal map in it. (I’m pretty sure you need to have a blue-magenta normal map, not a black and white one. To create one of these blue-magenta normal maps, there is a photoshop filter plug in offered for free from NVIDIA. Just google “Nvidia normal map” and you should find it.)
Once you have those two things, middle mouse drag both of them into the bottom window of the hypershade, where you work with node networks. Then middle mouse drag the file (the image node, not the placement node) onto the phong shader. A list will pop up with lots of connection options, but none of them are what you want. Instead you want to chose “other” at the bottom of the list. That will open the connection editor.
The connection editor should have the file node outputs on the left and the phong node inputs on the right. Just click on the file node’s outColor and the phong node’s normalCamera and both should become italicized. Then just accept it and your phong node preview will turn black. (or at least, mine did.) That’s it, now just save your file and use maya2egg to convert it.
I just confirmed that my normal map is working with Pview. Very sweet. 
Hi piratePanda,
I couldn’t find the normalCamera in phong shader, cos it was hidden in the panel. I had to check the option to show the key-able properties.
thanks