Tileable Normal Map Causing Hard Shadows on Beveled Edge with Static Lighting

Micah Whiting
Fri, 26 Aug 2022 15:14:44 +0000
Asset Creation

Hi,

I’ve been having an issue with a tileable normal map in UE4. Whenever I bake the lighting for this smooth beveled surface, I end up with this result:

The auto generated light map for this asset is correct as it has plenty of spacing and no overlapping UVs, so I know it isn’t a lightmap issue. The only way I have been able to make the problem go away was to disconnect the normal map in the material editor, creating this result:

I applied the material (with the normal map reconnected) to some other objects, baked the lighting, and got a similar strange results:

Interestingly, when I tried using a completely different tileable normal map in my material, the issues went away, as can be seen here:

I checked, and as far as I can tell, there are no differences between the settings of the two normal maps. I also tried flipping the green channel on the original normal map, but that didn’t change anything. Another solution I pursued was to use the supplied height map instead. My setup in the material editor can be seen below, however, I still got the same strange hard shadow.

As suggested in this post, I tried utilizing ‘Use Normal Maps for Static Lighting’ but, just like the user in that post, it didn’t help. I also tried using a brand new, smaller object with the same bevel to see of the problem persisted, which it did as can be seen below:

I’m using UE4 4.27.2 in case anyone is curious. Any idea what is going on here?

13 posts - 5 participants