hi everyone, have a strange issue with normals in substance painter, it is like the normal colors are working differently in each uv piece, this is really causing me trouble and don't know how to deal with it, it of course shows everything fine when viewed in material mode in substance, but again works bad when exported to other apps, any thoughts on this? would be very grateful for any help
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Hi @mhd35961030mubn,
Thanks for the question.
A visible seam in your normal view isn't a problem as long as you don't see it in your material view. It is pretty common to have normal seams, and this is due to the UV shells rotation. To make it simple, as the normals work in a tangent space, the purple (for example) will always comes from top to bottom (in DirectX format), regardless of the UV orientation. Therefore, if you paint something in between two UV shells, this may create a seam on the Normal map depending how the UVs are rotated.
In fact, these seams on the Normal map prevent seams on your Material. So don't worry, this is the expected behavior, and as long as you don't have an issue with how the material look, there are no problems.
That being said, if you're facing visible seams in tier apps, this is probably due to the Normal Format. Not all apps are using the same graphic libary (OpenGL or DirectX), and this will impact the normal map. As instance, Blender is using OpenGL, so make sure to export the Normal map as so. You can use the export preset dedicated to Blender to avoid missing anything.
Regards,
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