Maya Hypershade — Derive Z

A Hypershade plugin that reconstructs the blue (Z) channel of a packed normal map from its red and green channels — directly in the shading graph, no texture round-trip. It ships as two nodes: one for Maya's viewport-compatible shaders and one for Arnold.

Setup

Releases are built for Maya 2025 on Windows: download the zip, unzip, and run install_built.bat to copy the plugin files into the right Maya and Arnold folders (or copy manually for non-default install paths).

Building from source is scripted too — install_build_tools.bat pulls the MSVC build tools via winget (skip it if you have Visual Studio 2022), build_plugins.bat compiles, and install_plugins.bat deploys. On other platforms you'll need your own build files, but the source compiles the same.

This one took the better part of a year of being stuck — the repo includes a research markdown documenting the Maya texture-plugin internals that finally unblocked it, free to use for your own shader or texture plugin work.