Adobe Bridge – Full screen preview tips

Software:
Adobe Bridge 2020

  1. To get into full screen preview mode:
    Select an image and press Spacebar
  2. Use the arrow keys to navigate images in the folder
  3. Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in-out

Note:
In full screen mode, you may see the images display soft / low resolution,
Even if the actual image files have enough resolution to fit the display.
This happens because Bridge’s cached previews were not generated at display resolution.
To fix this issue:

  1. In Edit > Preferences > Advanced:
    Check the Generate Monitor-Size Previews option
    Br
  2. In Tools > Cache >Manage Cache..:
    Select Clean Up Cache, Purge all local cache files,
    And then click Next.
    * You may have to restart the program for this to take effect
    Annotation 2020-08-17 193558

UE4 – Quick fix for normal map encoding

Software:
Unreal Engine 4.25 | Photoshop 2020

Quick UE normal map tip:
If you load a normal map into a UE material and the result appears inverted, i.e. holes instead of bumps or the other way:

The quick fix:

  1. In the texture settings, check the Flip Green Channel option and save it:

Annotation 2020-09-06 160838

The deep fix:
* This can be performed an automated action on multiple files

  1. Open the normal map in Photoshop
  2. In the Channels panel, select the Green channel
  3. Press Ctrl + I,
    Or Select Image > Adjustments > Invert
    To invert the green channel.
  4. Save the texture and reload into Unreal Engine.
    Annotation 2020-07-06 233156

Inverted normal map:Annotation 2020-07-06 232554

Fixed normal map:Annotation 2020-07-06 233036

Related:
UE4 Bump map
UE4 – Procedural Bump Normals

Blender 2.83 – OSL bug and fix

Software:
Blender 2.83

I recently found that some of my OSL shaders don’t work in Blender 2.83.
More specifically, shaders compiled with Blender 2.83 had their microfacet bsdf not recognized by the renderer and return 0.
* Shaders that were compiled by previous versions did work.
Looking into the problem I found that the OSL source files that ship with Blender 2.83 are significantly different than the files shipped with previous versions.

Simple fix:
Copy the stdosl.h and oslutil.h from Blender 2.82 to 2.83.
On Windows these files are found in this folder:
C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 2.83\2.83\scripts\addons\cycles\shader

* I’m not suggesting to download the files strait from ImageWorks GitHub because I’m not sure the ones that ship with Blender & Cycles are not modified.

I have reported the bug here.

Related:
Using OSL Shaders in Blender & Cycles