fix – Oded Maoz Erell's CG Log

Adobe Bridge – Full screen preview tips

Posted on August 17, 2020August 17, 2020 by Oded Maoz Erell

Software:
Adobe Bridge 2020

To get into full screen preview mode:
Select an image and press Spacebar
Use the arrow keys to navigate images in the folder
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:

In Edit > Preferences > Advanced:
Check the Generate Monitor-Size Previews option
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

UE4 – Quick fix for normal map encoding

Posted on July 6, 2020October 31, 2020 by Oded Maoz Erell

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:

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

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

Open the normal map in Photoshop
In the Channels panel, select the Green channel
Press Ctrl + I,
Or Select Image > Adjustments > Invert
To invert the green channel.
Save the texture and reload into Unreal Engine.

Inverted normal map:

Fixed normal map:

Blender 2.83 – OSL bug and fix

Posted on June 17, 2020June 17, 2020 by Oded Maoz Erell

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.