Normal Seams in Unreal

[NautalusX]

My mirrored seams are showing up ugly with a hard edge in unreal. In Xoliul's Shader they are smooth. How do I fix this problem? Textures were imported with TC_Normal of course sRGB unticked..

This is a picture of the worst seam on the model:

It's lit with 2 point lights.

[aphexx]

the uv chunks have seperated smoothing groups assigned, i assume?

well perhaps dont put the seam in the middle of the handle.
put them like in this overpaint. and then set the smoothinggroups to match the uv islands.

bend uvs tend to produce seams, even when they have corresponding smoothinggroups assigned. and currently your 2 handle uv shells are heavily bend

[NautalusX]

Yeah, but all mirrored uv shell edges have this crease, even if it is slightly noticible. I'll try some more things.

[Ex-Ray]

Have you got a 2nd UV channel for the lightmap? If so try increasing the lightmap resolution.

[aphexx]

ah, the normal is mirrored?
then try to break the vertecies in the mesh along the mirrored edge. then bake again

[Talon]

Any UV seams in UE3 are converted to hard edges within the engine.

So to fix it, you'll have to make those edges hard all hard and bake the normal map accordingly.

[NautalusX]

Originally Posted by Talon

Any UV seams in UE3 are converted to hard edges within the engine.

So to fix it, you'll have to make those edges hard all hard and bake the normal map accordingly.

could you elaborate on what you mean? The way you said it is confusing.

Originally Posted by Ex-Ray

Have you got a 2nd UV channel for the lightmap? If so try increasing the lightmap resolution.

why would I need a second UV channel for the AO? explain this process please?

I tried seperating the low into 2 parts, and shifting uvs over one, and seperate smoothing groups along crease.. all fail.

Are you trying to say there's no way to fix it, and the only option is to move the creases to more favorable locations?

[Ex-Ray]

I use Maya and if I was baking your gun where you have a UV boarder edge I would make them hard edges. I'm not too familiar with Max but on those boarder edges you need to give them another smoothing group that give hard faceted edge. Re-bake and see if that fixes it.

Depending on how you light your gun, if you are using lightmaps as oppose to it being vertex lit you need a 2nd UV map with no overlapping UV's because you are mirroring it and you can't have overlapping UV's for lightmaps. I find that increasing the lightmap resolution can eliminates these sort of seams IF this is the cause. More info here:

Hourences' Community Site - Books - Tutorials - Jobs - Textures

UDN - Three - LightMapUnwrapping

Have you tried painting it out? Some info here:

tutorial: fixing mirrored normal map seams - polycount

Also which way is your mirrored UV's facing? In Unreal they have to go horizontal and not vertical. Some info here:

Texture Seam Problem - Epic Games Forums

As you can tell there are multiple possible causes of this issue, it's tricky to know which one it is. How does it look in the mesh preview window?

[Talon]

Originally Posted by NautalusX

could you elaborate on what you mean? The way you said it is confusing.

why would I need a second UV channel for the AO? explain this process please?

I tried seperating the low into 2 parts, and shifting uvs over one, and seperate smoothing groups along crease.. all fail.

Are you trying to say there's no way to fix it, and the only option is to move the creases to more favorable locations?

Any seams in your UV map, those edges that make up the seams are converted into hard edges (in 3D, not your UVs) when you import it into Unreal.

So you'd have to make those edges hard on your model, then re-bake the normal map so that the normal map has been baked with hard edges expected and will therefore look correct.