Normal maps banding.

Questions & Answers
1

I am curious what the official work around is to the banding in normal maps. This banding is especially visible on very reflective surfaces.
while abrupt and simple angles like paneling grooves or nicks look fine, the smoother more gradual areas suffer some harsh banding. my “normal” solutions would be to dither or use 16bit png(even though pngs are the devil) as the normal map but it seems that unity or the standard shader at least doesn’t play nice with 16bit.
116158-banding.jpg

just to show specifically whats going on here is an example of the problem. The area of the normal map that corresponds to the circled area has a very gradual slope. This is where some of the banding occurs.

i do hope there is just some import setting or something that i have been missing.
thank you in advance for any info or help.
-j

3

thanks for the reply :slight_smile: sadly this was directly after an export and map generation and i am reasonably sure that nothing has altered the mesh or normal map other than unity’s import processing . I have tried all of the variations of the import setting i can think of that would apply for both the mesh and the texture to no avail.

its frustrating that the banding is not present in substance or in max but is in unity. now the comparison to substance might be unfair since it internally uses higher bit depth textures, but if max can do it should not unity be able to? this also brings up that a higher bit depth normal map does not seem to improve the banding in unity. this leads me to believe that either unity is down sampling the higher bit depth or some other factor is at the root of the banding.

2

anyone else see this behavior with normal maps and or have a fix?