Macro normal maps on Landscapes

anonymous_user_aa80c6eb1 · February 28, 2015, 6:33pm

I have a landscape scene which was generated from a height map I made in World Machine via Zbrush. It works nicely, but I also generated a normal map to overlay on top of the displaced mesh to add more lighting information.

The trouble is, the normal map from World Machine is rendered to a flat plane, so when it’s combined with the lit, displaced mesh in Unreal, I essentially get double lighting.

I could explore World Machine for a solution, but I wonder if there’s a way on the Unreal side. In short, can I tell the landscape to be lit exclusively by the normal map, not by the face normals?

Thanks!

darthviper107 · February 28, 2015, 9:05pm

I don’t think the normals can ignore the mesh normals

Generally macro detail can be made into the mesh detail instead of using normal maps.

anonymous_user_aa80c6eb1 · February 28, 2015, 10:07pm

That’s too bad, I guess I’ll have to get the effect I need some other way.

Thanks anyway though.