[SOLVEDish] Substance painter export issues. Normals broken along mesh seams...

[GoldenxHawk]

I'm practically done with a skin of mine, but, of course, I'm simply running into technical issues with the evolution engine's rendering. I managed to work my way through the tint mask nightmare through trial, error and some brute force logic puzzles, but I don't know where to begin with these normals...

Here is the Substance painter view of the model with it's normals:

And here's the tennogen viewer's... view... of the model with normals:

I assume it has something to do with normals being calculated differently for different rendering systems, like DirectX renders differently than OpenGL. I would just fiddle around with the way the normals are flipped about, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that in substance painter? (could I just fix it in Gimp?)

I'm using the default export that was provided by DE and everything else seems to be working A-OK. 😕

Thanks ahead of time for anyone who can give me some directions...

Edited May 2, 2018 by GoldenxHawk

[PROSETISEN]

Not a SP issue.
Tennogen Tool always incorrectly displays the normals. 
If in other programs  displays correctly, then everything is fine.
 

[Stenchfury]

Hey; yeah, the Tennogen viewer seems to be quite brutal with seams.

It doesn't look to me that the normals are inverted there; it's just the seams being very visible; test it out in marmoset or sketchfab and see if they behave correctly there.

Being a skin I would guess the model and UV are correct; there (being the official content); but if you are baking from a hi-res you might try baking at a higher res (4k) and just export it at the normal resolution; also make sure that you are exporting at 16bit from substance.

[GoldenxHawk]

8 hours ago, PROSETISEN said:

Not a SP issue.
Tennogen Tool always incorrectly displays the normals. 
If in other programs  displays correctly, then everything is fine.
 

It's not fine though if I'm having an issue in the Tennogen viewer and the target platform is the same engine that runs the Tennogen viewer.

8 hours ago, Stenchfury said:

Hey; yeah, the Tennogen viewer seems to be quite brutal with seams.

It doesn't look to me that the normals are inverted there; it's just the seams being very visible; test it out in marmoset or sketchfab and see if they behave correctly there.

Being a skin I would guess the model and UV are correct; there (being the official content); but if you are baking from a hi-res you might try baking at a higher res (4k) and just export it at the normal resolution; also make sure that you are exporting at 16bit from substance.

The only reason that the seams would be visible is if the normals were, A: Not accurately baked onto the mesh i.e. shifted sideways, B: They aren't being interpreted properly by the engine, or C; They're not being calculated and baked in a manner that is correct for the Tennogen viewer's engine.

I took a look at it in 3 different programs, Blender, Unity, and Sketchfab.

Here's Unity:

Here's Blender:

And finally, Sketchfab: (Sorry this one is hard to see)

They all have the same issues here, the normals are being rendered inversely to each other, which makes me think that some channel is flipped...

Edited May 2, 2018 by GoldenxHawk

[GoldenxHawk]

After playing around with the Sketchfab viewer a bit more I think I figured what's up. Everyone saying that it is OK is right, but they shouldn't be 😕

The tennogen viewer doesn't flip the y axis of the normals, whereas in game they are flipped, or vice versa. Either way, they aren't congruent, which is a damn shame DE...

I took Rhino's default normal into Sketchfab and with nothing done to the normals they look like this: (this is also what it looks like in the tennogen viewer)

But if you flip the normals by toggling this little radio switch...

You get what it looks like in game. It's kind of hard to see on this particular model, but if you look at them long enough you will spot the distinct differences...

I personally think this is a huge issue being that the viewer app is supposed to give an accurate representation of what your model will look like in game and one of the most important maps in modern game art isn't being rendered properly.

I'll try and draw attention to this in another thread and hopefully something will be done about it, until then, now you know.

[Swaggernaut64]

Most game engines need the y channel to be flipped as far as I know. This is the case in the source engine, and the program handplane can correctly translate normal maps to the correct way depending on what engine you want to use it for.

You can easily do this in Photoshop by going to your channels tab, selecting your green channel, and pressing CTRL + I to invert it. Then it should work properly.