Community Tutorial: Visual Guide for AO and BentNormal Maps

Understanding the impact of AO and BentNormal Maps under different Lighting Setup.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/9Gr9/unreal-engine-visual-guide-for-ao-and-bentnormal-maps

2 Likes

Hi @Kettenotter !

Nice tutorial. Now it is having more sense to me.
Could you please share an screenshot to know where are you connecting the nodes? To the material at the Normal slot, or to BentNormals node?

Thank you

Sorry for that! Just plug it into the the BentNormal custom output. You can find it by right clicking and searching BentNormal.

Updated the guide with the full screenshot.
Feel free to share any of your findings regarding BentNormals :slight_smile:

1 Like

I am glad you mentioned about seams. I am getting seams from Bent Normals i baked in Blender, and thought it may be the OSL script i was using to calculate it. If Marmoset is having the same issue, i am thinking it is something else. X-normals (for a test) had seams too. There must be a way to get blender to not have seams…

I only tried Marmoset and Substance Designer. I am a big fan of Marmosets baking capabilities but sadly it didn’t work for UE Bent Normals. So if you can get your hands on Substance Designer I would recommend it. But if you get it working with something else feel free to share it.

In the UE documentation they only mention Substance Designer. More Information from their documentation:

UE Bent Normal Docs
…make sure to adhere to the following information when creating your Bent Normal maps:
→ Use Cosine Distribution when creating the Bent Normal map.
→ You can use Substance Designer 6 to generate the Bent Normal map just like a standard normal map or an AO map.
→ When generating your Bent normal, make sure your character is in a T-Pose.
→ The Bent normal and the AO should use the same distance setup.
→ The Bent normal should be in the same space as your Normal map. (Tangent Space)

1 Like

I discovered that it had to be in Tangent Space, not Object Space. (entirely forgot about this thread until your message notified me. Problems of working till you collapse :/)

Great information, thank you!

P.s. The OSL script for Blender works beautifully. any issue was my own lack of experience

1 Like