The effect of normal maps on almost all of my meshes seems really disappointing compared to results some other developers are seeing, so I think something is wrong. In fact, normal information is almost fully invisible in plain sunlight, and jarring artifacts appear in Roblox on what are as far as I know, perfectly normal maps.
Provided is a UV mapped plane exported with tangent information with a few simple test normal maps, as well as a test mesh exported similarly. For the most extreme normal map I also get really hideous artifacts, which also happens on the other included test mesh.
This only happens for FBX meshes seemingly.
Diffuse and specular scale are both set to 1 and Technology is set to Future under Lighting. A skybox makes no difference.
SurfaceAppearanceNormalTest.rbxl (34,9 KB)
Plane.fbx (12,2 KB)
Rocks_Tangent.fbx (27,0 KB)
CPU: Intel(R) Core™ i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz, 3192 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)
GPU: 4095MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (MSI)
Meshes created with Blender.
Test normal maps generated with NormalMap-Online.
Textures for the rock generated with Substance Designer + Substance Painter.
High contrast normal map
Medium contrast normal map
Low contrast normal map
Normal map artifacts on a textured mesh
I think I should see much more more visible normal information here, but I don’t.
Note the artifacts around the pits/holes in the texture.
The metallic map is the same for both metallic and roughness on this example.