@smurfmier1985 Hey Miranda, I gave it a look and I some info on that topic:
For procedural masks, Joakim Thornill (Blender Insight guy, he’s pretty skilled with procedural texturing) released a tutorial last month on how to generate procedural normal map. It’s not exactly an actual normal map that is generated but it’s a quite smart workaround: you need to duplicate twice your bump mask and shift it a bit along the x and a bit along the y and then use these shifted texture as input for an RGB combine node, with a constant B. It’s far from perfect, you need to use UV unwrapping only and I find some limitations when looking at the object under some angles (back to my comment on the not-so-much-a-normal-map).
For imported images there’s the possibility to write a python method that basically calculate for each pixel of the image how much it differs from its neighbors and generate different type of maps (based on the type of pixel difference you’re after). It’s much more accurate and also possible to implement it in a (very) complex nodes setup like Tim Crellin does on his Super Texture addon. I got curious and will dig there some days 🙂 But I have no idea (yet!) how to implement this for procedural masks.
So be patient ! Hopefully the blender developpers will solve it!
