Roads at night w/headlights have too much noise. Normal maps too strong?

Question

Product: EA SPORTS™ WRCPlatform:Steam-PCSummarize your bug Road surface at night extremely noisy using headlights, with black dots and blobs in the distanceHow often does the bug occur? Every time (100%)Steps: How can we find the bug ourselves? Drive a stage at night using headlights.What happens when the bug occurs? Creates excessive noise and artifacts when driving.What do you expect to see? Something closer to reality and all other driving / racing games at night using headlights. ‌It seems like some of the surface texture's materials / normal mapping / bump mapping / parallax mapping (idk what is being used here exactly) on the roads is too intense and strong, which creates faux "shadows" in all these little divots and pockmarks, that simply become black dots or blobs of noise in action that also flicker at distance. It's a real problem in tarmac / asphalt locations at night. It can be less distracting to drive with the lights off, which is crazy. It's also pretty ugly on gravel stages, too!It's especially bad with AA turned off and no upscaling, but very visible in any mode with any upscaling or no upscaling and highest AA settings (Epic/Cinematic).DLSS seems to do the most to stabilize much of the noise compared to the other upscalers, but also turns the whole road surface to be an unnaturally darker color than it should be when lit up from bright headlights (see examples below). Also makes it more "swimmy" from the extra ghosting DLSS adds. It looks alive while driving. Super strange and unrealistic.The way to tone this down that I know of currently, is to disable Anisotropic Filtering. This kills a lot of the added detail from the texture's maps and the fake shadows produced by them, but this looks pretty bad, too, since the core texture detail under the additional surface detail map is lost as well. AF off is also really bad in wet conditions, but it's something way closer to reality in dry conditions.Examples from Croatia:No Upscaling w/16 AF: https://imgur.com/qjGeWAV.jpg (noisy)No Upscaling w/No AF: https://imgur.com/jl8oZgq.jpg (blurry, regular texture detail is lost)DLSS w/16 AF: https://imgur.com/xYPCNgB.jpg (unnaturally darkened and still noisy)DLSS w/16 AF no headlights: https://imgur.com/xipCzOR.jpg (dark but at least natural looking!)Notice in #2 with No AF, you can still see some larger "craters" on the road surface from what I would assume are the normal maps, even with most of the finer details obliterated in the distance. That's how strong they are. I know when I used the editor to make a map for a different UE4 game, the default normal maps for textures were far too intense, so perhaps this is just a basic oversight there. Should be simple enough to adjust for all road surfaces if that's all it is, but I know nothing is ever simple when comes to creating a game.Bonus from the bumper cam16 AF: https://imgur.com/WOVowuJ.jpgNo AF: https://imgur.com/rJkjocH.jpgThe last screenshots, you can really see the detailed surface/normal maps up close and what's likely part of the issue, and see there where these divots and pockmarks fall off with Anisotropic Filtering disabled, eliminating the noise in the distance.Now, the road ahead with AF disabled is obviously too smooth / blurry and unnatural and lacking basic texture detail the other way, there surely could be a better middle ground. Using 2-8x instead of 16x AF is still really bad and still noisy at night using headlights. I've never seen any racing or driving game where the surfaces look like this at night w/ headlights on. It's truly bizarre. It's also an issue in some of the other darker daytime lighting conditions where you may want to use headlights, but it's a lot easier to go without headlights there.I don't know what the solution for this would be beyond toning down the severity of the normal maps (or other surface maps) applied on top of the textures. Perhaps the light method used for the headlight has properties to tone the results down as well? It's all very strange in motion when it comes alive, super distracting, I would include a video example but compression doesn't really capture the finer details there well.

pyide_maybe · Answer

If it is indeed the normal map intensity of the road textures at fault here, here's is a quick and easy guide on how to adjust those in UE4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVmgWneIj24

mike_hmt · Answer

@pyide_maybe a video tutorial really 😄

pyide_maybe · Answer

@mike_hmt&nbsp;wrote:@pyide_maybea video tutorial really 😄Hey, you laugh, but it's the studio's first time using UE4, sometimes the small details get overlooked and ignored, another prime example there is with the auto-exposure / eye adaptation intensity in the interior car views in the daytime. It's possible they don't know what the problem is and how to quickly address it. It's also very possible they don't even see it as a problem at all, the game did ship with this insanity in effect after all. That's what troubles me the most.It's a brief, informative example showing how simple it would be to tweak the road's materials, then test if it has any difference and impact on their end. Not something we can adjust on our side, unfortunately. This is all presuming it is an issue with the surface maps being too strong. It may be something else entirely. There are other ways to tweak the normal maps, too, that's just the first one I saw. Maybe even better ways than that.Only included it as a jumping off point, plus it provides a good visual example of the difference the default UE4 normal mapping strength can have vs adjusting it to reduce the effect, for players who may not understand what the heck I'm talking about, but know that something is messed up with the roads at night from having played the game some.

pyide_maybe · Answer

Small addition, these are comparing the loss of artistic details in the actual road (like the tire / driving lines and cracks and such) because of the intense normal maps or whatever is amping up the roughness of the surface too much and playing off the headlights to create all that noise.

Headlights off: https://imgur.com/knM8lEF.jpg

Headlights on: https://imgur.com/7CtPyFi.jpg

Headlights off: https://imgur.com/j7sC1Dr.jpg

Headlights on: https://imgur.com/kQE3fZG.jpg

You can actually see more detail and what the road surface is really like in the total darkness. Wild.