Faking acurate reflections with an environmet texture on a model with a normal map

Question

So, I've tried making cubemap-like reflections on a model with an environment texture (the ones that come with blender for now).

The sphere on the right has just the regular reflection from the viewport shading. The sphere on the left is basically the same but with the environment texture imported and layered on top of it.

As you can see, the flat part of the texture lines up perfectly with the actual reflection but the parts that are distorted by the normal map don't match up. Now, I'm really bad at math, so I'm already glad that I got this close but I still wanted to ask if you can help me get closer to accurate reflections.

Thanks in advance for any reply.

(how do you end stuff again?) Uh, Love you. Bye.

Answer 1

I believe this node setup can help you. I myself was looking for this exact issue recently, and have stumbled upon this. This node setup is the same as the reflection vector from the Texture Coord input, with the geometry normal replaced with a normal map node. The only issue seems to be that it looks wonky from a orthographic view, probably tied to the camera view and fixable with some other kind of math wizardy.