Normal map showing as inverted on import of Substance Designer (.sbsar) file

[Gulli05]

I was getting ready to do some landscape texturing with a new material but the normal map in the .sbsar file is showing up as if inverted (Showing mostly green values instead of the standard blue) when inside the content browser of UE4 but looks  different inside the material editor (and inside Substance Designer 5.6). See pictures below.





I'm simply wondering whether this is normal or whether it is a sign of some form of bug or mistake when outputting my normal in the graph of my material.

[Dan Stover]

Hello Gulli05,
This is actually expected behavior. (kind of) 

This is a result of the upgrading normal map compression to BC5 compared to DXT. The reason you are seeing the normal map in yellow is because the thumbnail and texture editor window viewports in UE4 do not support normal maps or grayscale maps for dynamic textures. If you look at the texture from the thumbnail of a texture sampler within a material you will see what you are used to seeing as the material does detect the dynamic texture formats and renders accordingly. 

This is not ideal and something we want to look into fixing.

Even though this is slightly annoying, this should not have any impact on the final results within the main viewport.

Thank you for taking the time to report this!

[Gulli05]

Hope this can be fixed in the future, because this definitely confused me. I had been going back and forth trying to invert the normal map and do all sorts of tricks with it, but nothing changed. Didn't realize until an hour after trying to seek a solution that the Normal Map looked okay in the Material Editor.

Thank for the help!

[drichardson]

This still seems to be a problem. Is this something that needs to be fixed in the Substance plugin or UE4 editor proper?

[Wes McDermott]

This still seems to be a problem. Is this something that needs to be fixed in the Substance plugin or UE4 editor proper?

This is something we will need to address in our plugin. We are working on some backend changes to do this.

Cheers,
Wes

[christianbumba]

I find the same problem in the substance plugin for unity. (Release Version 2.5.1)

It is easy to workaround. I just export from substance designer and overwrite the plugin baked Version of the normal map ...


Cheers