Hi guys, some help would be greatly appreciated. I created a Normal Map that is working, pressing the “L” button on the preview windows of Material Editor I can see the map “3d simulated” (or something like that) moving nicely, that’s ok!
I added a brick wall with this material (my brick image, not the UE4 original), in fact it looks like the Material Editor. I also added a spotlight to my player, so that it inherits position, rotation, it’s working fine. The problem is, when I get close to the wall, the light is there on the wall but I’m not seeing the “3d effect” of a normal map. I mean, I should see the same result as pressing “L” on the preview windows of the Material Editor, right?
I changed both material and light to “Moveable” but no result.
One important fact, I’m using a Dell notebook (yeah, I know it’s not a good option) i5 2.30GHz, 6G RAM, HD 3000 Graphics. Maybe graphics card is the problem?
Thank you guys!
Can you post some pictures of the material editor and your viewport with the light? I hate to ask this but does the normal map correspond directly with the brick texture or is it just like a bump map?
No problem Eye, thank you.
Material Editor:
Playing:
As you can see, stopped the normal looks like the material editor preview, but moving the player (and the light), I can’t see the “3d effect”, that we can see on the material editor preview.
Thank you Eye.
Ok now I see better what you mean. The preview in material editor is only a representation of what your material could look like. It doesnt take into account any uvs or the actual model you apply the material to. Also Normals will look flat when you look across them because they lack actual geometry. It’s only information to affect lighting to fake “depth” so when a bright light moves across it messes up the effect. So what you see there in your second picture is as the material is mapped up toward the top of the model, because its a sphere its on the same plane as the camera so it looks flat. only when the camera is directly on it will you see the normal effect. Here is an example
In the top picture the plane looks flat because its a simple plane. But it has a normal map on it.Second picture looks better because the camera angle is more directly on it. Hope this helps.
Thanks Eye, I’m newbie with rendering, I was introduced to normals this week, so I may have a wrong conception of things here. Also, my english is basic and may not help, sorry for that.
In the preview window of material editor, I had change to cube and got the same effect. What I mean is, when you are on the material preview and hold the “L” key, then you left click on the material and move the mouse, you see the light moving and a kind of distortion on the material (bricks). The bricks motion looks like the shape tween effect on adobe flash, you really see the brick image changing when light moves over it.
When I saw that I couldn’t sleep for days (I’m a newbie in rendering), and tried to reproduced this brick motion. Perhaps I cannot accomplish this with normal maps? Maybe other effect will make it?
So, to clarify, if I come close to the wall the bricks are perfect and I can see the normal map shadows but it’s static. If you move the spotlight in the wall parallel or angular, you don’t see this material morphing. Now it looks like normal but is flatten.
The question is, how can I reproduced the light movement (holding the “L” key and left click on the preview material editor) to get this motion (morph) between image and normal?
Thank you and excuse me for the mess on the informations.
Perhaps it maybe me not understanding =). So in material editor when you press “L” it grabs the light so you can move it around and you want to do that in the game engine viewport?
One more thing to look into is displacement maps. This is also a normal map that makes thing look like they stick out. You might achieve the look you want by combining a normal map with displacement. I can tell in your first pictures that there is a normal map it just is not as strong as you want. You can make a blueprint to control a light in your viewport so as it shines on your texture you see the bumps and cracks of the normal
Correct Eye, I want to reproduce this effect on the viewport. I got now, I will read about Displacement Map, thank you!
