Dark shadows on lower half of face

Unity Engine
1

Since moving to Unity 5, my characters all have dark shadows in the bottom half of their face when just using a single directional light. It’s like each of them has a “five o’clock shadow” (even the girls!).

Has anyone else seen this behaviour? I feel like it’s something very simple, but my knowledge of lighting is limited, and I’ve tried a lot of different ideas and just can’t crack this one.

Any ideas what I’m doing wrong?

2

Could be bias, but a screenshot of your dir light parameters and a screenshot of the artefact you are seeing would tip us off a bit more (at least I hope).

3

Sure - here’s an example. I played with the bias values but it hasn’t really changed very much. Any ideas much appreciated.

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4
  1. try setting shadow cascades to 4 in quality settings
  2. ask unity to generate normals for the model - i suspect issues like this are either bad normal map or bad normals (most lighting issues are) - if this doesn’t work then check to see if the same issue is present without a normal map
  3. I recommend gillette gel or foam, it helps razor glide better although the smell is somewhat manly.
2 Likes
5

LOL - thanks Hippo, I’ll investigate further - I think you’re right about the normal map. And the foam.

6

Hippo’s advice totally nailed this issue - my characters just needed normal maps for their faces (they previously only had albedo). No razor purchase necessary!

In case it’s useful, I came across a great free resource for generating normals (as well as displacement, occlusion and specularity maps). Runs on both OS X and Windows: http://crazybump.com

1 Like