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So, I have been on a bit of a journey wrapping a texture around a sphere. So, if you are reading this looking for spherical texture wrapping solutions, I would suggest checking out my last post as well as the walk-through I followed by @DMGregory, who has been helping me extensively.

Currently, I have a texture properly wrapped around a sphere with no warping at the poles. When I add my height map, however, the bumping flickers when the model moves and does not look great standing still either.

Original (with warping at the poles but little artifacting at the bumps): Little Artifacting

Current (with no warping but significant artifacting at the bumps): Much Artifacting

I understand it is very hard to tell the difference from a screenshot. If you zoom in on the normal map of each picture, you will find that the current version has a lot more distortion at the bumpier areas.

Current (the flickering is not gif compression): Example Gif

Current (zoomed in): Zoomed In

And, here is my current shader graph: Shader Graph

Any idea what is causing this? I should mention that the original does have a little of this distortion, just not nearly to the extent that my current version has. Thanks in advance for your help.

Harper Rhett
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  • Looks like you're using an LoD level calculated for the base map as input for the height map. This can misbehave if the textures have different resolutions. Other possible causes include not enabling mipmapping or bi/trilinear filtering on the height map, or something in the "normal from height" node. Have you tried using a normal map rather than a height map to eliminate that last possibility? – DMGregory Jun 29 '23 at 14:03
  • @DMGregory hmn I converted the resolution of the height map to the resolution of the base map and no luck. Also, import settings for both are set to generate mip maps and billinear filtering. I did notice that if I turn the aniso level up the distortion worsens. But, at 0, is still present. Also, it is a little more clear what is happening at the pixel level, so I am uploading a zoomed in screenshot to my post. You can see in-between the pixels there is weird artifacting.

    I am not sure how to use a normal map because my source material is a height map.

     – Harper Rhett Jun 29 '23 at 18:29
  • Did you search "convert height to normal map"? – DMGregory Jun 29 '23 at 18:48
  • @DMGregory I was unhappy with my search results the first time (file size too large, shader code which was basically height to normal). But, I digged further. My apologies, I should have the first time. Anyway, I found I could use Gimp to convert my height map to a normal map. So, I did. And, I plugged it into my shader graph. But, for whatever reason, we now have distortion at the poles again. Even when using the generated UV as input. I think it is because the way equirectangular mapping is streteched at the poles it is not smoothly converted to a normal map as a typical texture would be. – Harper Rhett Jun 30 '23 at 11:55

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