Made a tutorial on how to reconstruct the blue channel of a normal using shader graph so you have an extra mask slot to work with, if anyone has anything specific they would like to see next please let me know!
#Unreal Engine 5 - Recalculating Normal Blue Channel
latent iris
lapis kraken
@latent iris
In almost no cases is it worth it to pack another texture in the blue channel and use some material nodes to append the Red/Green channel of a normal texture.
The Normal compression --under the hood-- Puts the Red channel of a normal map in the combined RGB channels, and the Green channel in the Alpha channel (which is basically a combined RGB channel to begin with), and generates the blue channel through magic code.
So unless a very specific situation, compress normal maps as normal maps, please.
Normal map compression also means that each level of mipmap chain, that is generated for your texture by the engine, will be re-normalized.
This limits the possibility of storing anything other than an actual normal map using this compression setting.
lapis kraken
Imma add something to it, as I didnt have my coffee when I mentioned that.
the tutorial itself is good, explains well.
But unless you are still making stuff for the xbox ps2/3 (even phones nowadays outshine those) there is almost no reason to still use this approach.
It was utilized a lot back in the day though, very common even.
latent iris
Sorry for the slow response had a busy weekend. Thank you though for taking the time to explain in such depth. I never knew about the blue channel being auto generated already on the code level, so it was very informative. Glad to hear that the tutorial structure was good though, a good first step on that front and ended up learning something myself in the end. Thanks again!