Weird "shading" on tree leaves.

Hello! My leaves turn white in the sunlight. Im using HDRP and the trees from book of the dead. Subsurface scattering is turned off.

 

Hi! Did you manage to solve this problem?

 

Those tree meshes have manipulated normals at their leaves, you need to recalculate them.

 

Just assign the foliage diffusion profile in the material of the leaves...that does the job

 

Nope, that won't fix it.
it's correct that there's no diffusion profile applied, but that only fixes the greenish transmission, not the incorrect lighting on directly lit surfaces, which is caused by the mesh normals.

 

How?) Is it in the model import settings?

 

Yes, set Normals to "Calculate", that should fix it.

 

Most likely you won't be able to fix it, it comes from the PBR specular shading.
The only way to fix it now is to go to the directional light and disable affect specular.

With forward path, the shader can be changed to disable this spec shading, there there is not way (not that I know of) to disable it on the shader level.

 

It's definitely caused by the mesh normals in this case, I had the same issues with those trees from the book of the dead and recalculating the normals fixed it.

 

Not always. Here I have the unity plane, so the normals are correct.
Here is how it looks from the front:


And here is on the back:


Directional Light - Affect Specular disabled:

 

There were plans to add support to disable the spec on the shader level, but it seems it is on hold:
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/2556

 

If you crank up the normal map strength to over 1 the lighting is incorrect too (if the normal map is correctly baked and matches it's source mesh), so that behaviour is expected.

 

Agree But still, the option to completely disable the spec would be nice too.

 

Hi! Actually, I'm here because of these highlights on the shaders to Tve))) How can we contribute to fixing this problem as soon as possible?

 

Hey, well there are a few options on our side and a few on unity side:

On our side with tve:
1. Better meshes and normal maps
2. Reduce the Main Normal Intensity on the material
3. Play with Render Normals - set them to Flip or Mirror
4. In BIRP/URP, I added an option to Disable Specular on the material

On unity side:
1. In HDRP, Disable Affect Specular on the directional light
2. If something like this is implemented: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/2556
This could be added as a toggle same as the Affect Spec on the material.

The biggest problem right now is that some assets are created in BIRP with a Blinn Phong shading, especially stylized assets, and Blinn Phong doesn't have the PBR implementation of specular highlight, so no issues there. As soon as you convert some assets to HDRP Subsurface Scattering, based on the mesh normals and normal map, you might see these artifacts.

I just got the Terrain Sample Asset Pack from the unity store, and some of the meshes still have these issues.


But the normal map isn't the best (way to exagerated)

compared to some better normal maps


And all go away by disabling this option. As a tradeoff, I would like to be able to use this on the material.

 

Thanks! It feels like Unity Technologies does not understand how much these reflections spoil the graphics, we are waiting for corrections...

 

I don't think it is unity fault, I think that minimum reflectance value of 0.04 for dielectric specular is the standard implementation of PBR in many engines, probably in all of them, I don't know all the technical details. But since there are options to disable it, it would be nice to have it

 

As mentioned above, a good option is to recalculate the normals, but there are assets where trees are represented only by meshes without .fbx file and such a function disappears, changing the material settings to different normal map modes also fails to get rid of, disabling specular at dir light is also a bad idea because lighting completely disappears from many important areas)))

 

I know, I'm dealing with this every day

 

WE NEED MORE TOPICS AND MAYBE THE DEVELOPERS WILL HEAR US AAAAAAA!!!11

 

book of the dead trees yes do have some poor vertex tangents and vertex normals

@ProGameDevUser
actually, it's easier to recalculate from .mesh format than FBX as FBX cannot be save at run time requiring an extra step in saving the re-baked data

we made a few tools to do this within unity as it's such a common problem

 

Can you tell me more?) What kind of tools?

 

it's a set of small mesh tools i included with our asset
Scripts & Tools – De Environment

useful for rebake normals and tangents to gain visually correct environment lighting
it will work on any mesh you select and bake except perhaps speed tree billboards as they don't use anything we can access

as common mesh issues can make even the best shaders look incorrect my goal by providing this was to reduce possible support questions due to problems caused by others and impower our users to fix easily within unity
this does not fix every problem issue such as texture compressions but is just one more tool in the kit to improve workflow

i also included tools for bake AO and a tool to bake vertex colors for our wind setup
this is on sale now for 50% off
DE Environment | VFX Shaders | Unity Asset Store

 

Thank you very much! This will be very useful in any project

 

Yes its very powerful
for formats like .mesh .obj just bake and it's fully saved into the mesh
for FBX formats to permanently save just one extra step is needed use the free Unity FBX tool from package manager to save it permanently

when you use select the parent object it will detect everything under it
take care in case you bake a unity cube or something i added a reset button just incase you do that


cheers enjoy