Unreal 4 Normal map settings

kohg

So as i was working on an environment in UE4 i noticed some of my props had terrible shading, i didn't think much of it and thought it could be the lighting, until i noticed, while i was creating a new material, that the shading got worse once i inputted a normal map.

Turns out, that all the props that had bad shading, had the normal map settings set to WorldNormalMap in the texture group and Normalmap compression  in the compression settings. After turning to World (texture group) and Default in the compression settings the bad shading was gone.

I don't know if this is some sort of bug in the new UE version, anyway, my question is apparently my normal maps should have their settings set to World and Default? Am i losing something by change their settings?

Mirbobo

I haven't encountered this issue with UE. The Normalmap compression setting is because UE4 uses BC5 compression for Normal Maps by default (Removes Blue and alpha channel from the texture), but the DXT compression should be usable on normal maps as well. The texture group determines some Mip mapping/compression settings that you can find from one of the .ini files as far as I know. Dunno if this can cause issues.

Essentially I don't think you're losing anything changing those settings, but I'd probably still try checking if the props work in a previous version/clean project just to make sure.