Substance Painter 2 to UE4 - Normal Map Seams

TH98

Hey all--seems like every time I think I'm good at baking normal maps they come back to bite me in the ass. I've spent the better part of the day trying to get this model's normal maps to display correctly in Unreal and I've run out of ideas. Any insight would be HUGELY appreciated.



Here's my mesh in Maya, with just the edges of the UV islands hardened, which I think (?) is best practice for baking.



Here's my utility pole in Substance Painter 2. Normals are displaying correctly. Normals are set to DirectX and "Compute tangent space per fragment" is checked, which I understand is the correct way to do it for UE4.

I'm exporting TGA textures using Substance Painter's UE4 preset.



Here it is in UE4 looking hecked up. I've tried flipping the Green channel in the normal map texture, but that just makes it look differently, equally hecked up.

I've tried unlocking and redoing the smoothing groups a few times when exporting to UE4, which doesn't seem to help.



Here's my Maya export settings.



Anyone have any ideas? I'm starting to go a little crazy here.

Love, TH98

TH98

UPDATE: On a whim, since I just started using Substance Painter 2, I decided to have one last go at baking out the normals in SP2 *and* SP1. I did the same exact steps for both, and I seem to have found something interesting:




As far as I know (unless I missed a changed default setting somewhere) I did everything exactly the same in SP1 and SP2, but only SP2 produces the jacked up normals.

Is this a known issue?

ZacD

Your green channel is inverted, make sure Substance Painter normal map format is set to DirectX. 

Make sure compute tangent space per fragment is checked for UE4 as well. 

TH98

ZacD said:

Your green channel is inverted, make sure Substance Painter normal map format is set to DirectX. 

Make sure compute tangent space per fragment is checked for UE4 as well. 

Mentioned in the OP, but flipping the green channel didn't help--it just looked differently incorrect. Compute tangent space per fragment was checked in all cases

ZacD

Oh, make sure UE4 is set to import normals and tangents. 

TH98

ZacD said:

Oh, make sure UE4 is set to import normals and tangents. 

Hmm, I just tried that--doesn't seem to have made a difference.

The x-factor seems to be Substance Painter 1 vs 2--when I export from SP1 it works fine.

Froyok

For a fully synced workflow with UE4 please refer to this page : https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Unreal+Engine+4
Don't forget do use the right settings for your project too, see : https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Project+creation