normal rendering in maya

[thee]

does anyone have experience rendering normals in maya?
Normals look good with high quality rendering on....till i hit the render button, then the model looks like some mummy crap.

http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg122/qwapenga/normalpoop.jpg

[thee]

mental ray is even giving worse results, renderman (wish it wasn't a eval version) giving me the best results sofar, it should be easy to do.

[Fredddy]

Without knowing any of your settings no one will be able to help.
By the look of your image I would guess you have the normal map
plugged into the bump node of your texture.
Try disconnecting it from bump, then connecting the outColor of your file node
to the normalCamera node of your texture.

Hope this helps.

[thee]

thank you very much for replying sorry for giving to little information. theres still something wrong when i try to render it.

here is a screenshot with all my settings and shaders
[img=http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/8482/testingzl7.th.jpg] (http://img183.imageshack.us/my.php?image=testingzl7.jpg)

[thee]

http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/368/testingwk4.jpg
sorry last link didnt work did it?

[Fredddy]

When you say 'still wrong', in what way do you mean?
It's probably me but the viewport and render views look the same.

[thee]

http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/5814/resultska8.jpg look it's as flat as a pancake

[thee]

when i turn maya hardware rendering on it works!! thanks fredddy

[nightwoodwolf]

method supplied by Freddy should work, i use JS_NormalMApper but i noticed you are using Maya 8.5 you can dirctlly drag the file to your blinn or your lambert whatever, and select Bump from the menu or even drag it to the bump slot in the attribute editor, BE SURE to change the Bump to Tangent Space in the Bump Node and that should do it, make sure you smooth your edges by going to Poly menu n then Normals > Soften Edge or you can set the angel to 180, add a front and back light to help you judge your map better.

hope this help