Normal map's neutral color has to correspond to #8080FF HEX value. In this case the resulting normal will be exactly the same as the normal of its underlying face. When I made a normal map texture in Blender and imported it into a game engine, I found that at seams I often get strong artifacts, because all my normals got skewed by the texture color offset (my neutral color was BCBCFF)
I am trying to save a normal map from Blender (OS is Ubuntu 15.10) so its neutral color corresponds to 8080FF. Here is what I am doing so far:
- Generate a texture -- Color space 'Raw', 32bit float.
- Bake normal map in Cycles or Blender Internal
- To check that I have #8080FF as neutral -- in the paint mode I select 8080FF color, paint over neutral color region, and I can see the neutral color is identical to #8080FF
- Save image as 16 bit PNG or OpenEXR
- When I check the neutral color in Gimp it shows BCBCFF value
What am I missing?