You found one UV island where the normalmap is actually looking incorrect and base your conclusions after that. Thanks but no need for the basic introduction, I know how normalmaps are baked and the common mistakes done

It will show one of the ways people can screw up normal maps. Do some research on the math behind how normal maps are made. If the low poly model is too big or too small vs the high poly, you can get get clipping issues JUST like this.

They take a low and a high res models, click “make normal map” and don’t bother checking the settings for it. I’m sure many other people do the same thing as well. This means that they projected their normal map wrong in whatever 3d package they use. You can very clearly see the faceting inside of the normal map. Again, look at the normal map texture… It’s a HUGE giveaway. I’m going to have to disagree with you still. More info here: Dynamic shadows artifacts - Feedback for Unreal Engine team - Unreal Engine Forums as soon as you bake your lights in the level the problem is gone because you’re not using dynamic lights and shadows anymore.ĪFAIK the issue isn’t properly acknowledged by Epic yet (the one place where I saw an answer by someone from Epic seemed to treat it as a shadow bias problem) In your case the problem shows up in the model viewer because that viewer uses dynamic lights and shadows. in this sphere you can see the faceted-polygon shadows 1:1 with the mesh topology, and then the shadow acne lines in a circular pattern emanating from the bottom left of the sphere) In fact some cases show both issues combined together (i.e. in any case this is something not present in other engines I would suspect some soft-shadow smoothing logic to be responsible but that’s just a gut feeling. I would describe the symptoms as “the shadowmap pass seems to render objects with faceted polygons”, or maybe more technically as “the shadowmap seems to produce decimal values in relation to the angle of incidence, instead of producing hard values”. It’s plain to see because the artifacts match the mesh topology 1:1, as opposed to how shadow acne behaves (which causes lines perpendicular to the light direction, along a surface independently of its topology).

Wings 3d make edges hard