Normals appearing stepped/warped in IRAY, Maya and Unity 5 - HELP

switz

So I can't for the life of me figure out what's going on - Modeled a simple high poly cylinder and low poly game mesh in Maya 2015 and 2016. Exported and baked as usual in Substance Painter and Xnormal; I'm getting stepped artifacts in both programs. It looks perfectly fine in the substance painter viewer.. have a look:


Then if I switch to IRAY renderer or even bring the model into Unity - I get a stepping artficat:

IRAY:


Unity:




Can someone please help me out here - I've read through what feels like every tutorial/help page and I cannot see what I'm doing wrong here. I've been trying to solve this issue for the past 3 days.. It's driving me NUTS!

switz

Removed the previous post about my gun model having the same issue. Please help someone!!

switz

Adding the normal map bake from Substance - looks perfectly fine to me 

switz

Here's my gun model that started the problem - as you can see in substance painter, the normals look perfectly fine... But when in Unity, Maya, or IRAY the normals look totally fucked.. It's subtle but if the surface is really reflective you can easily spot it. I just want to know what the hell is going on here..



Now this is what I begin seeing in IRAY, Maya and Unity


Maya:

Dumbanana

If it's showing up perfectly fine within Substance Painter then I would have to guess it's an error that's occurring through the export options. I would check what file format you are exporting as, and also what bit depth you are using. Maybe someone else has a more concrete explanation.

.Wiki

Are you using the corresponding export module for each target?

Obscura

http://polycount.com/discussion/148303/of-bit-depths-banding-and-normal-maps/p1

musashidan

What does the texture map itself look like when zoomed in? Strange that it's fine in SP render but like that in SP Iray. 

switz

@Obscura I read through this and regardless if the map was 8-bit or 16-bit the banding still appears..

@musashidan This is what the map looks like right out of substance at 16-bit:


The problem is beyond just my gun model though - as you can see from the cylinder post it's happening to anything I bake out from either XNormal or Substance.. It gets pretty extreme on curved surfaces.

I should mention that normals look fine in the XNormal viewer as well. 

Here's a snapshot of my substance UI - TextureSet settings are set as default with Normal Map being at RGB16F

Obscura

After baking a 16 bits one, you should convert it back to 8 bits so the banding gets dithered.

switz

Obscura said:

After baking a 16 bits one, you should convert it back to 8 bits so the banding gets dithered.

That appears to have fixed it for now - quality has been affected slightly but I'll live with it. Thanks

AlecMoody

Obscura said:

After baking a 16 bits one, you should convert it back to 8 bits so the banding gets dithered.

Or use a baker that outputs dithered 8bit normals. I'm not sure why every baker doesn't do that.