Hi, I’m having a problem with normal map on my 2D Unity project. I need to use normals on this object called “Player”, but for some reason it seems that the Player object reads only the red channel of the normal, leaving completely black everything else. It’s not a normal problem, since I painted …

Even if hand-painted the Normal works fine, it was “hand-painted” using value and the calculator on the side, plus every other object with hand-painted normal works. Eventually I found the solution. The game is a 2D game, so they are all sprites on quads, all on the same Z-axis. I noticed that all …

[IdleLeft] In the images it clear that the in the Player object only the red channel works while on the other object also green and blue channel are taken into account.

I’m not sure how you made this normal map, but it doesn’t react well to light: [Screenshot 2026-04-27 at 12.46.37 PM] That is to say, the problem is the normal map, you need a better one. At any light angle, it goes black: [Screenshot 2026-04-27 at 12.47.25 PM] You want something that looks mo…

The whole game is in gamma space not in linear. In linear color space the normal behave in weird ways. Not sure why, but in 2D Unity if the color space is set to linear normals behave weirdly, even the one I used for tests (not done by me). Setting the color space to gamma somehow fix the weird beha…

[image] unity_FC55EA5041DF6D1A971E: The normal is done by hand on a painting program, realized taking in account the very definition of normal map (red channel = x axis inclination, green channel = y axis inclination and blue channel= z axis inclination). Your green channel looks wrong to me.…

I know that painting normal map by hand is not ideal, but for what I need to do I found no other solution. The fact that the green channel ranges from 0 to .5 is indeed why I need to hand paint my normal map because I’m using them to create depth in a 2D top-down view. I’ll show you what I mean vi…

[image] unity_FC55EA5041DF6D1A971E: The whole game is in gamma space not in linear. In linear color space the normal behave in weird ways. Not sure why, but in 2D Unity if the color space is set to linear normals behave weirdly, even the one I used for tests (not done by me). Setting the color s…

It does nothing, because if the colour is in gamma space (like my case) a secondary texture used as a normal can be in “Default” or “Normal” or “sprite” and the result won’t change, the normal map always works. Still, the normal map on object Player show the usual problem.

When you set the texture import settings to “Normal map”, Unity normalizes all color pixel values to turn them into unit length vectors before compressing the image. So unless your normal map already contains proper normals (which is unlikely to be the case if you hand-painted your normal map) you r…

Normal map shows black on blue and green channels

Unity Engine

ekakiya April 28, 2026, 1:20pm 7

In URP 2D’s top view, technically the sprite is facing to screen, but it’s front vector is the direction of screen bottom ish. So, the normal map’s center vector (rgb)=(0.5, 0.5, 1.0) point in the direction of screen bottom too.

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Normal map shows black on blue and green channels

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