Lightmass is smoothing my normals

Lucas Annunziata

So I'm having an issue in a scene I'm currently working on. Wherever there is an object with shadow on it, the normals seem to smooth/soften. I have proper lightmaps for most of the objects in the scene and have read through the udn concerning lightmaps. I'm not sure if this is something that is supposed to happen?

I am using maya, exporting the assets as an FBX with both 'smoothing groups' and 'tangents and bi-normals' checked. Upon import, I am checking 'explicit normals'.

I have tried a non-dominant directional light, and still the same thing is happening.

Here are some examples:

rasmus

I'm sure if you added a secondary lightsource you'd see that the normals are still hard - they just don't have enough lighting variations in the shadow to show up atm. The blurry stuff is SSAO, which you can turn off, and in the second shot, baked AO turning into a blurry black mess due to lo-rez lightmap settings on the object.

AlecMoody

Yeah, those are probably stitched edges in the UVs so the shading is interpolating across. If you really want the super hard edge look you can just add a UV split and padding.

Lucas Annunziata

Thanks a ton guys. Even with just a slightly specular material and the bounce lighting from that, its looking way better. Now I just feel like a goober.