Normal Map Problem

Development Rendering
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1

Hello everyone, there’s one issue that was bothering me for a long time… I want to port one game into UE4, and first I decided to convert the main character. In 3ds Max on renders everything is looking just like in the actual game (exactly, the normal map)

113879-render.png

…but when I imported character into UE4 and then applied material with normal map to it, this happened…

113880-ue4editor+2016-11-04+14-56-50-36.jpg
113880-ue4editor+2016-11-04+14-56-50-36.jpg1456×870 286 KB

And only if you knew, how many times I tried to fix this. I tried to flip Normal map’s green channel, switch X/Y wrapping to “Mirror”, change compressing to “Normal Map”, disabling alpha… Nothing happened. I did ask another forum about this, and people in there said that normals in 3ds Max and UE4 are rendering differently, but if it’s true, then what should I do? I put the actual normal map with character into “character.zip”

Is there any way to make it work? I tried UDK and Unity for this, but nope, absolutely the same results.

P.S. Without the normal map character in UE4 looks fine, without this “mirrored” effect and other issues.

2

You could try to bake the normal map in another program like xnormal. it’s free and fairly simple to use. Be sure to search you tube for some videos on how to do it so the process is faster to learn. I used it all the time until I met Substance, it’s bakers are excellent.

3

The results are… Weird. Can you help me with it, or I should continue experimenting?

113924-normal_test_normals.jpg
113924-normal_test_normals.jpg1024×1024 215 KB

4

Good day. There is a well-described workflow to avoid issues with normal map.

5

This is because the texture and normal map are made for half a sonic, and mirrored for the other half.
That doesn’t work for normal maps, so you’d need to create a new normal map for the entire sonic model.
It should also be a tangent space normal map.