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aleksanderm84368526
aleksanderm84368526
Participant
April 5, 2022
Answered

Normals from projected textures change color(direction) between two sides of a seam

  • April 5, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 728 views

Projecting a texture (Warp, Tri-planar... anything but UV projection) results in this issue.

 

I'm attaching an image. I just recreated it with a simple unwrapped sphere (exported from Blender) and used normal textures shipped with SPainter.

 

Is that a bug? A feature? Or maybe it's because of how I exported the 3D model from other software?

 

Specs: Substance Painter 2021 Steam edition, FBX models exported with Blender.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Léna Piquet Froyok

That's expected, this is how normal map works. The UV orientation isn't the same from one side of the seam to the other, therefor the normal map vector will change.

What matters is the resulting shading to look fine in Material mode.

1 reply

Léna Piquet Froyok
Adobe Employee
Léna Piquet FroyokCorrect answer
Adobe Employee
April 6, 2022

That's expected, this is how normal map works. The UV orientation isn't the same from one side of the seam to the other, therefor the normal map vector will change.

What matters is the resulting shading to look fine in Material mode.

aleksanderm84368526
aleksanderm84368526Author
Participant
April 6, 2022

Actually, I did get the mirrored effect in my exported normal maps. But I've just figured it out thanks to an old thread on Substance forums. My issue was a mix of a couple of factors: I unintentionally exported DirectX normal maps from an OpenGL project (didn't realize presets have their own normal map formats), and then I most likely didn't realize my texture node inside Blender flipped back from "Non-color" to "sRGB" (it does it every time you replace a texture) which made the mirroring effect visible so even after fixing OpenGLproject to OpenGLexport I must have tricked myself into thinking it's still messed up.

I just set everything up and got a beautiful gLTF file, fully textured working as intended. Thought I'd share.

aleksanderm84368526
aleksanderm84368526Author
Participant
April 6, 2022

Oh, worth adding I was exporting OpenGL->DirectX then re-importing that back to Painter OpenGL then re-exporting that to DirectX I mean, I can't blame it for something going wrong along the way.

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