Weird texture artifacting

[Zenmir]

So i'm having a really strange issue at the moment regarding normal mapping. I normally don't bake my normal maps, instead opting to paint/draw them using NDO in QuixelSuite. Up until lately I haven't done anything major with it and my maps seemed clean. All of the sudden i'm noticing these weird pixel-ly splotches in my map here and there and I can't for the life of me figure out how to rid myself of it. If anyone could help i'd greatly appreciate it ^^; I'm really wanting to get better at content creation and this is quite a troublesome visual damper. 

[OptimoMaximo]

From what I can see on the picture, aside from the normal pixelation on diagonal shapes due to texture size and, well, being diagonal... The only other artifact I can notice is the stripes of blue light along the indentation edges... Is that what you're referring to? If it's that, I thing that might be an effect from the environment lighting. If your specular map doesn't use alpha map for the environment map, you may try lowering the environment exponent in the shininess texture tab. SL uses a simple sky dome for that effect, just an horizon with clear blue sky and a grey brown gradient on the bottom. 

[Zenmir]

I changed windlight to highlight the issue a bit better     It's almost like scratches or something or like it's posterized in some way. I don't know what's going on, it almost seems like a compression problem of some sort? Those area's of the normal map should be nuetral color/flat.

[OptimoMaximo]

Oh ok now I can see more clearly. I definitely missed those. It looks like a quantization issue. There may be two possible solutions:

1) normal map is not normalized. Sounds like a pun, but it's not. I use Substance designer, and the more I play adding normal map details, the more the channels get overloaded and the values at some point tend to go beyond 1. Normalizing the input height before turning it into a normal map avoids this kind of issue, or just normalizing the normal map after the blending has taken place. Which brings to another possible thing if you did normalize the outputs or this feature is not available in quixel... 

2) your normal maps are encoded in 16bits. Normal maps should always be 8bit depth. If you work in 16bit, when the normal map goes through the rendering pipeline it is squashed into 8bit and that's not gonna work well, creating those stepped blotches (quantization artifact). 

 

[Zenmir]

Oof, that second one was it x.x it's a quantization problem indeed and as predicted, a rather ugly one to boot. Thank you for helping me figure this one out Optimo, you've been quite the major life saver. 

[OptimoMaximo]

Glad it worked out!