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I was wondering if anybody could help me with this problem I'm having with all my models/normal maps.

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As you can see, it mainly happens on the handles[the handles of a knife model]. You can still see the hard edges of the low poly mesh, but there is still some detail from the high poly mesh. I'm not sure how to describe it.

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It happens again here. I've tried to use a cage but that didn't seem to work... I don't really know what to do, and I want to stop this problem before I make anything else because I don't know how much it will take to fix this.

Thanks for any help :)

(edit)Images with it rendered

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It doesn't show up much in those images, but it does show up a lot in the game I'm trying to mod it into - maybe this helps too?

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Here is one more example with a pole model that I tried to smooth out

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This is it with the normal map on - it looks like it barely does anything but it still does - I can see some slight smoothing if I look at it closely, but it's not nearly as smooth as the high poly

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Here is one with the normal map off

Forgot to put in a normal map node - woops - this is what it looks like with that active

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  • $\begingroup$ Could you post a picture with the problem showing on a shaded model with the normal maps? $\endgroup$
    – Martynas Žiemys
    Commented Aug 4, 2018 at 6:14
  • $\begingroup$ yeah I can do that - do these work? $\endgroup$
    – LSman
    Commented Aug 4, 2018 at 19:11

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There should be some lines on the normal map: normal normal maps If you have flat faces and bake normals of round forms to them, then the edges should be visible in the normal map because the normal map needs to transform those flat planes to round smooth forms while still being mapped onto the flat faces. Normal directions should change at the edges and cannot be smooth gradients. Let's have a look at what is going on with normal directions when smooth form is mapped on a corner and then the normal directions are projected onto a flat 2d texture: what normally happens with normal normals It makes sense that we see a sudden change of values where the edges are. They should not show on the shaded models. In other words - it's normal to see lines on normal maps like these :D . There may be other issues with the baking process that cause the result not to match your expectations. the game engine may expect different format of normal maps. OpenGL and DirectX treats normal coordinates differently. Try inverting the green channel in the normal map or choose -Y instead of +Y in the baking settings for the second channel: enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Ok, thanks! That helped out my understanding of normal maps a lot - also, there was something wrong with the bake settings. I forgot to put one of the normal map nodes in the node editor thing - just me being dumb. Now the render looks how I expected it to be. I'll see if inverting the green channel will work too for the game engine $\endgroup$
    – LSman
    Commented Aug 4, 2018 at 23:46

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