2D sprite lighting with normal maps does not correctly with light position

[smotired]

I am trying to figure out how to use 2D lighting with normal maps for all my sprites. I made a quick and dirty character sprite and normal map to try and figure it out. My project is extremely bare-bones right now, it’s really just the sprite with attached normal map, and a minimal scene. The scene is just the character, a low-intensity global light, and an area light. Here is what my character looks like when the light’s normal map interactions are disabled:

If I enable the normal map in the area light’s settings, I don’t get the expected results. It looks okay when lit from the right as above, but when I drag the light to the left of the sprite, the shadows stay on the left.

For comparison, this is how the character is meant to look when lit from the left (screenshot from the program used to create the normal map)

I really don’t know what could be causing with this, I’ve messed with all the settings on the area light and nothing seems to fix it.

Operating system: Linux Mint
Unity version: 6000.3.10f1 LTS
GPU: Nvidia RTX 4800

This is the normal map that was created, it looks fine so I don’t think it was an issue with that program. And I attached it to my sprite as a secondary texture within Unity like you’re supposed to

[Kurt-Dekker]

@smotired

the shadows stay on the left.

Are you sure you don’t have some other light source like a skybox in there?

[smotired]

The only other light source in my scene is a global light with a very low intensity. And if I remove it entirely it doesn’t change where the shadows appear from the normal map.

[MaxwellTan]

Hi @smotired, have you try set the texture type to Normal map?

[smotired]

Oh my God that was it, thank you. I feel stupid now. I had it attached to the main texture as a normal map but had not actually set up the importer like that.