So I was trying to reproduce this tutorial for Lightwave on Blender: http://iaian7.com/lightwave/SoapFoamSurfacing
Basically the guy uses a node setup to get procedural Black&White bubbles which he then uses to generate Normal Maps using a custom setup. You can get the same B&W bubbles using a Voronoi texture on Blender then using a Minimum(Math) node to isolate the shapes (or use a Color Ramp instead).
The problem is, if you feed the result of the B&W bubbles directly into a normal map node you get pure black, which is wrong.
When you input it firstly into a Bump node to convert B&W to normal values, then into a Normal Map node, the result is too dark, is as if you were using a normal image without selecting Non-Color-Data.
For comparison, this is the result using the following normal map image:
Here is the same, but with Non-Color-Data selected, and Color selected on the right:
As you can see, left is correct, right is wrong.
Then here is the node setup for procedural bubbles:
The result is not exactly the same pallette as a normal map image would be, but I tried keep going anyway.
This is the result of that bump node going into a glass shader:
As you can see, no "bubbliness" is present, they are kind of flat.
If you feed the Bump node into a Normal Map node, this is the result:
So I'm not being capable to reach a result similar to what I'd get with a regular normal map image. I wanted it to be procedural so that I could put it in any object instantly, without repetition no matter the size and shape.
At first I thought that the output of a Bump node was being interpreted as being Color Data, instead of Non-Color Data, so these are the things that I tried:
1) follow this node setup to convert from sRGB to Linear (and the inverse as well):https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?251208-sRGB-lt-gt-Linear-Nodegroup
These are the terrible results:
2)Then I tried using this node setup which is apparently for Procedural baking of normal maps on cycles: https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?348799-Baking-Cycles-Procedural-Normals-to-Texture
This was the result:
Still too dark... apparently the node setup did nothing to "fix" the output of the bump map.
Anyone have any ideas? This is the blend file: http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=46983
Regards