cheap tricks - mesh color by normal direction (akin to normal map)

by Alessio Erioli

Apr 6, 2016

Found it almost by accident while working on something entirely different, and maybe not exactly the same kind of mapping you would find, say, in 3D studio or Blender, but a fast and cheap way to test your mesh normal orientation.

Enough foreplay, here it is:

All the first part is just to generate some noise-displaced mesh, but all in all is very simple: plug your normals into the vertex color input (I cast them to colour right outside for speed purposes). It may also be nothing new, but I searched a bit without finding anything similar.

  • Ryan Whitby

    Any idea on how its converting the vector to and rgb value inside the Mesh colours component?  I tried using the deconstructed vector with fRGB and XYZ colour components but the values it returns are different.

    Apr 6, 2016

  • Alessio Erioli

    if you plug the XYZ vectors with parameters from -1 to 1 (which is the normals range) you can see how it converts to color. As expected, they influences RGB values respectively (X -> R, Y -> G, Z -> B), -1 to 0 and 1 to 255, leaving the other color parameters to neutral gray (128).

    Apr 7, 2016

  • Petras Vestartas

    Pretty colors:)

    Apr 7, 2016

  • Alessio Erioli

    nice!

    Apr 8, 2016

  • Stuart Lodge

    Hi Alessio,

    Can you please tell me what the component name is that that has the inputs (Pt, t, s)

    Thanks,

    Stuart

    Oct 9, 2017