Normal Maps not showing up in viewport

sybrix

Hello folks,

I've been battling an issue with my normal maps in UDK for a week now without any solution in sight. My normal maps look fine in the material editor preview and maya viewport, but when I apply the material to my static mesh it doesn't show up at all in my UDK viewport.

Here's the material in the UDK preview window and Maya high quality viewport:





And here it is in UDK, looks like no normal map is applied at all:



Things I've tried/have already done:

Rebuilt lighting a bajillion times
Imported normal maps with TC_Normalmap compression
Inverted green channel

Am I missing something?

Adam L. Gray

I don't think this is the case, but just to rule out the possibility of it being too weak to show up. Try multiplying your normalmap in the material with a constant 3-vector with these settings:
R: 3
G: 3
B: 0.5

If it doesn't show up now, then it's simply not there at all

sybrix

Thanks for the response, but still no luck. Here's what it looks like with the multiplier node:





It looks like it's starting to timidly peek through, but whenever i crank up the numbers in the 3vector it doesn't have much impact. So I'm guessing there's something wrong with my normal map?




(inverted G channel)

I have two other similar rocks in my scene with this carving in them and they're all effected by this normal map issue. I generated them in Maya with a transfer map.

sybrix

I figured it out after many more hours of kadoodling with it. In Maya I didn't smooth the normals correctly which I think was throwing the normal map off. Instead of using "smooth edges" I had to set the normal angle to 180 degrees on all the faces (which is the exact same thing, but oh well), then re-exported the FBX. This seemed to resolve the issue.

Ace-Angel

A good way to boost your normal map is to use the Append and Mask nodes.

Connect your Texture (black box) to a Mask node with RG enabled, and multiply that by a constant.

Then put up a Append node, and connect the Mask and Blue channel of your Texture to it.

Use constant to 'boost' your RG channels.