Normal Mapping is described in the help file. Just click on the "Material" button just under the Color, Gradient, and Texture options.


Material with Normal Maps

The Material button will allow you to select an image that is applied as a Normal Map. A normal map is a way of adding a textured surface to your style wich will react to light movement with highlights and shadows. To add a normal map, click on the “Material” button and select the desired image. You can then use the Shininess control on the Style tab and the lighting controls on the Scene tab which will affect how it casts highlights and shadows. See these images showing how different textures are achieved using the same material but different lighting conditions.

I think this is more expensive than what Travis eluded to but I've been told good things about CrazyBump (recommended by Blender users). There is an open source code application at http://normalmapgenerator.yolasite.com/

Thanks DC.

Edward, my question relates to the s/w that Travis mentioned that would allow a User of NBTP3 could use to GENERATE Normal Maps that would be compliant with NBTP3. I know where I can get to the NBTP3 Normal Map textures.

Grazie

Here's the software Travis mentioned:

http://shadermap.com/home/

ShaderMap 2 is $40.

Edward, thank you very much for asking Travis.

Grazie

Any suggestions for speeding up renders in Titler Pro3? My current title is taking 1 minute per frame (720p 24fps project render). My project files render at about 12 frames per second without the titles so something is clearly wrong. The title itself is quite basic.

I'm running VP13. It doesn't look like GPU rendering is enabled. I'm using an older ATI HD4550 512MB card which is fine for everything I do - except apparently this.

Ideas welcome.

For rendering speeds, I really can't say. I do know that Titler Pro is extremely GPU intensive.

Yeah last night was brutal. I had to abandon a three hour render at 98% because it crawled almost to a complete stop - one frame per minute. I just deleted the offending Titler Pro3 title, spent about 20 minutes remembering why I hate SONY's ProType titler, dropped some plain text in there instead and re-rendered the whole thing (including three other Titler Pro3 titles) in less than 30 minutes.

I was rendering two consecutive output formats without closing Vegas first and I think that was the problem. The first render, while slow, went fine. The second one is the one that crashed. Back in the old days I used to always exit and restart VP between renders.

@24Peter: As has been said, NBTP3 is GPU intensive. I wanted to view your System specs to see your GPU specs. You're showing WIN-XP? What's your GPU spec?

Grazie

Some things that can help speed things up:

1. In Titler Pro go to Settings and turn off "High Quality Preview"

2. In Titler Pro go to Settings and turn off "Use Motion Blur"

3. In Vegas, change the preview to "Preview (Auto)" (won't change the rendering times but can help in design mode)

[I]@24Peter: As has been said, NBTP3 is GPU intensive. I wanted to view your System specs to see your GPU specs. You're showing WIN-XP? What's your GPU spec?[/I]

Grazie - thanks for your reply. Those specs were two systems ago. Updated to my current specs - which are actually almost five years old, so I am still behind. I use a small form-factor machine that sits right on my desk (personal preference) so it has a low profile fanless Radeon HD4550 512MB card. It is time for a new system so probably won't upgrade the card (I do mostly still photo editing in CS6 and the card is fine for that.) It's an old Q8300 Intel Quad core system. Win 7 64. 8GB RAM 2TB 7200 rpm HD.

I did disable the high quality preview but thought the motion blur setting would affect the output quality? Anyone know?

Motion Blur would only affect the output quality on moving titles.

What Catalyst version do you have installed? 512 Meg is the minimum recommended RAM