Creating "THE" normal map...

[Steve Parish <english(at)janimation.com>]

I am having some difficulties in creating a good normal map. I was wondering if anyone had a good workflow that is quick!
I am basically trying to bake out some Darktree shaders so I can render it quickly and reliably.

The only succesful normal map I have made has been through the Ultimapper, but this is a ridiculously slow procedure (1 map at 2K has taken over 13hrs so far).
All rendermap efforts have failed except when it was on a perfect sphere (damn tests) and this seemed to be because the tangency looked correct, every other test applying tangency looks broken up..

I have been using the XSI Model Map to generate the normal maps and then piping it back using the normal map node... I generate a tangency too...  The result is a broken up jigsaw image... grrrr

Any suggestions?


Thanks

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STEVE PARISH
3D GENERALIST