Normal baking utilizing the Labs Maps Baker

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Not sure if this should go in the Houdini Engine area or the labs area however -

I have a HDA, that I create a high poly model, create a low poly model, bake that high to the low with the Labs Maps Baker, export it to Unreal and have the normal map hooked into a material.

The mesh/maps I create from Houdini, by hitting the render button and exporting the models and manually importing the result into Houdini looks fine, but I am getting errors on the ones generated directly in Unreal through the HDA.

Everything seems to be connected properly however, I get some (best I can tell) inverted normal issues happening on the models.

- The normal maps the tools create are identical (both HDA and manual import)
- Both are applying the normal maps from a material instance derived from the same master material
- The normals for each of the static meshes seem to also be identical.
- UV's are identical

I had this issue on an actual tool I was creating, so I recreated it using the most basic set up I could think of.

I feel like there must be something obvious I am missing - but everything seems to be the same...

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So I turned off tangent space inside the material I was using and they all looked wrong, but they all looked the same kind of wrong. So that led me down a path where it looks like its the bitangents and tangents that are getting messed up.



I'm not sure where Houdini Engine does the calculation of these but they are different from the ones I get from importing the same mesh. I also turned off calculate Tangents/normals etc to no success.




I tried using a poly frame node inside the HDA to set these, but I don't know whether maybe unreal is looking for different attribute names or what, but it didnt really fix anything. Made it look much worse.

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