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Normal maps seem to cause strange effects on the areola-area

Since I'm updating my characters quite a lot these days I found this strange artefact happening upon the edge of the - let's call it - "areola-horizon".
What I did was adding a normal map called "skin" to the whole body. I tiled it down to 30 to make it look realistic and for the rest of the body this is how it looks:
Pretty neat I would say.

So am I missing a point to fix it on her areola-area or is it a bug/technical problem coming from the way the areola is created?

Big thanks in advance and cheers! :)

Comments

  • odesodes Administrator
    Can you share this file with me please?
  • odesodes Administrator
    I've been trying to figure out what exactly is going on here, but I still don't quite know for sure.

    The areola is drawn separately from the body due to the areola/nipple projection tech.

    It's essentially drawn using an identical shader, but with different mesh data and with higher tessellation.

    This areola mesh is derived from the body mesh (cut out from it), and when rendering the areola, we're looking up its data from the skinned body data using an index mapping. Somehow, perhaps this index mapping doesn't work quite right for the tangents (seems to work well for vertices and normals though), causing the normals to look differently as a normal map is depended on tangents.

    Thing is, this whole tech is going to be abandoned next major release in favor of a "clothing" based approach which will enable any kind of nipple/areola shape. So I'm feeling reluctant to invest any more time into fixing this as any fix will be discarded later on anyway.

    For the time being, I'm afraid this issue will be present until next major release.
  • odesodes Administrator
    What I can tell you is that this issue is not present when not drawing the areola/nipple mesh (i.e. when only rendering the body w/o areola cut out). 
  • Nice to hear that a new release is on the way fixing it.

    Thanks for the quick response!

  • odesodes Administrator
    Never mind, I found the issue.

    For some reason, the areola nipple material was explicitly setting blurred normal (SSS feature) to 0. That is not correct. It's not doing that anymore.

    Will publish patch release soon.
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