In unlit mode everything is fine, but the moment I go into lit mode (may it be with rebuild lighting or dynamic shadows) the normal maps show (random?) seams where the vertex paint should blend them.
Url to example between lit/unlit: http://i.gyazo.com/11c6401c851dfbae60dbee62ff5ac18b.mp4
but on other places its fine:
And the vertex paint is done correctly:
And you can most def. see that the normals aren’t blending:
The diffuse and normal map of the floor are WorldAligned, so the seam doesn’t make any sense.
The UV maps are done correctly, there is no seam in the normal maps texture and the Vertex colors are correct.
I also triple checked the Lightmaps, at 256 I did notice a slight lighting seam, redid the UV to be sure that the floor section + part of the wall is nicely on grid in the 0-1 space but still those normal seams.
Any/all/some/a lot of help is appreciated because I am at a point where I am willing to pull my hair out… and I don’t have any on my head.
I believe i know what you issue may be and why it looks fine in some places and not in others. How do your vertices line up along that seam? And by that I mean do the verts line up in a point to point scenario. If they do not you would probably need another detail normal texture overlaying the seam to help hide it. I am looking for a article that was published a while back during the UDK days about how we typically hide mirrored seams, as soon as I find it I will edit this post and link it.
The vertices line up exactly along the normal-seam. Thing is, should the vertex paint not blend that?
There is already a detail normal present, ive tested with and without it to see if that was the culprit but it wasnt.
Ive double/tripple/quadruple/hexadruple checked lightmaps, uv maps, material setup and such.
It has something to do with light in combination with the normal (best guess so far)
Also, none of the materials are ever mirrored in this case.
I believe I have tracked down your problem. You have some pretty significant stretching along that curve portion of your wall. (I have attached a screenshot of the lightmap density visualization so you can see what I am talking about). Try to “unstretch” and “unsquash” the Lightmap UV Channel along that seam and see if that doesn’t correct your lighting problem.
Hello eric, The stretching comes forth of me testing to see if the seam occurs when the all the vertexes are on grid in the 0-1 space of the lightmap.
My best bet is still that the normals are not propperly blending for some reason.
You can def. see it in the mesh browser when you move around the light.
Here is a video of it:
Both the auto generate UV and my original uv causes this:
As an additional test I expanded the UV map of the floor so it adds a few more polygons on each side moving up onto the wall.
The result is still the same:
So as I said before, my best bet is still that something messes up when normal maps are blended by vertex paint. (which is also the main reason I passed on the material setup I made to be sure nothing is wrong in that.
But then again, without normals the whole mesh looks fine.
So that doesn’t take away the fact that for some reason the normals are not blending properly.
Thing is, I am working on this for a market place package.
I cannot permit myself to have those seams around as it would harm reviews.
Tiling the wall along the floor might actually be a decent suggestion which I am going to try asap.
It would mean a few additional vertices on about 150 meshes… but I have the time due to no paypal support atm
After attempting the extending to floor suggestion Ill let you know how it ends up.
Thanks for all your work Eric!
I cannot express my gratitude enough
Your normal has a tiling issue of a sort. In aligning your floor you are offsetting the normal map such that it is meeting the other normals at a corner and not on a tilable edge. Try to adjust the tiling to allow the tilable edges to remain along the cave walls as close as possible, or blend the wall texture further down along the floor itself.
Ultimately as well if you like the way it looks besides those few seams, you can always place rock props to cover it.
Hello erik, I remade the test mesh to allow the wall texture to blend on with the floor texture exactly on floor level (so there is no diagonal blending) but the seam still remains.
I believe I have discovered the issue and am working up images from my test to show you, but the issue revolves around vertex count. In the area where you have the seam (so along your wall to floor connection) you need to double your vertex count. This will allow smaller and more fine smoothing between the two textures. You don’t need to double your vertex count everywhere just in the seam area. Much like a Character artist would double the edge loops around bending seams for rigging purposes.
Yup, that finally did it.
In my case it Means I need to triple the polycount in regions where the vertex color needs to blend properly.
Which also means I have to practially redo all cave meshes I did so far.
Oh well. *puts on his sigh here we go again cap.
Hey Erik, After some more testing the past few days I did notice that adding more polygons where the seam is does hide it decently, but the seams where still there.
This in my case also caused some issues with blending two normals as well as one of the nodes I used to set the world position for the normals… which was not derived from a “world aligned normal” but a regular world align, which doesn’t have some of the math needed to properly blend the two normals.
After solving these two issues (The vertex color and the world aligned normal) there is actually no need for more polygons.
