Normal map looks terrible

Unity Engine
1

The LOD on the Normal map looks terrible and Bump map converted to normal in unity looks great. When I look at these sidewalk tiles from a distance unity drops the LOD obviously and when I approach it gets more detailed. Both the bump map converted in unity and the normal map from photoshop do this, except the normal map from photoshop has a very abrasive LOD, it isn’t smooth at all. It looks awful:

The bump map I converted to normal in unity however changes its LOD very smoothly. Are normal maps worthless? Should we all use black and white bump maps and let Unity do the converting to normal?

I found upping the aniso level helped the normal map a little, but leaving it at level 1 works fine for the bump map.

Weirdly, adjusting the aniso level helped one texture but not another even though they are identical in every way.

2

Looks like maybe your Anisotropic texture setting in your quality setting may be set to “Per texture”. Set it to “Forced On”.

1 Like
3

The plot thickens!

I found that this crappy looking LOD was still occurring with “Anisotropic Textures” set to “Forced On”. I then found that by reducing the “Texture Quality” to “Half Res” the LOD crap went away but the textures looked bad.

I then went back to using the bump maps that I had converted into normal maps in unity using the “Full Res” texture quality and the “Forced On” Anisotropic and I had good looking textures AND no crappy LOD changing!

With the imported Normal maps, the Anisotropic Texture setting only pushes the LOD cut-off back a little by turning it to Forced On, it doesn’t make it smoother.

4

You have to make sure your shader is reading the texture as a normal map otherwise it doesn’t view it properly.

5

I can assure you the textures are set to normal map. Unity would give me a notification if I forgot to do that.

6

Is the filter mode on the texture set to trilinear?

7

I tried tri, bi and the other one and nothing helped.

8

first thing to do is apply just a simple diffuse shader, and get your texture looking correct, forget about normal maps (they will use the same setting as your texture once thats working with diffuse).

Next up, that invisible event horizon thing you can see, is a product of bilinear filtering. You need anisotropic set to 2 at least, with trilinear AND have mip mapping enabled for the texture to see the effect of anisotropic.

finally you should set all the preferences in your graphics card driver to default. If anything is set to fast or whatever, it can cause issues like this with high frequency textures.

Once you’ve debugged your problem with the colour texture, you can go back to using a normal map shader. Finally ensure your settings are not set to per-platform settings.