Seeking advice: Smart material normals not baking in?

[DarkChorus]

I am having the exact same issue as this site poster:
http://3dcoat.com/forum/index.php?/topic/20393-normal-mapdepth-does-not-work/

Smart materials without bump/displacement/normal maps work fine (such as metals or plastics). When I fill the layer with a smart material that has a normal map (i.e. leather bumps), the normals do not appear in any render or texture map.

Thank you for your patience with a stumbling new user. :)

Edit: (Shortened post length for clarity.)

[KlatschenKalle]

Hm... I never thought about doing it that way but maybe it's because what normal bakes do is that it bakes the physical geometry into a normal/height/* map. And Smart Materials are materials that bring in their surface information as a normal map - so my guess is, that the baker just takes the underlying geometry (which lacks the normal information) and bakes just this and disregards the material.

But I may be wrong.

[DarkChorus]

The Smart Materials seem to be tied only to the Ambient Occlusion and the Curvature layers. I tried editing the leather smart material to increase the roughness and depth but it did not affect the renders. The 3D coat render engine might not be using a lighting system that AO requires to be visible??? The Smart Material Preview shows a bumpy detail that I can not display in a final render. Perhaps if I could export the AO texture layer, I could use a different render engine to reveal these missing details.

Thank you for your patience and support. :)

[DarkChorus]

Found a solution, I think. I had to export all texture maps and use a different render engine (Blender) to view the Smart materials with a normal map. The render engine included with 3D Coat does not show any normals, displacement, bump, or AO texture maps. (if it does, I can't find where to activate those render settings.) It appears that I must export the texture maps if I want to see a Smart Material outside of the 'Preview" Smart material window. Baking textures does not enable Smart Materials to appear in 3D Coat's render engine either.