Object procedural texturing issue

[Hannes]

Thanks, Jordan and Ulco!

Here is something I'm working on at the moment: a worn and rusty painted metal material.
On the left shaderball I unchecked "use smooth normals" to get the unfaceted look of the power fractal. Unfortunately the object is faceted. Not too obvious, but visible.
The right shaderball has the same texture applied, except "Distort by normal" unchecked, and apart from that I made the smallest scale of the PF even smaller, because the blotchy shapes in the shader to the left, which looked very good to me, were too even and looked really bad without distortion.

I really like the look on the left object. It looks more like paint. The shader of the right object looks more like a weird planet surface.

Btw I sent a bug report about that.

[WAS]

Yeah the distort by normal definitely gives a better look in this case. More paint like.

[Hannes]

I increased the smallest scale again a bit, and I think it's a nice compomise. I'll put it into the file sharing section.

[Matt]

On another note; I also wondered if the automatic recalculation of normals shouldn't be to off as default. I don't actualy know if it is (will check later), but I often recalculate my normals in Poseray carefully for each part, and don't need it messed up by an average recalculation (no offence for the feature).

EDIT: I think I got it; it only recalculates after a mesh displacer has been added. So does nothing if just importing?

"Recalculate normals" on the object's Mesh Modifiers tab only applies when it's applying a mesh displacer or an MDD file, otherwise it does nothing. Even when it is used, some of the options preserve some characteristics from the original file's normals and don't necessarily smooth everything: https://planetside.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=OBJ_Reader#Mesh_Modifiers_Tab

[Matt]

There is a known issue with "Distort by normal" on imported objects. At the moment it relies on the underlying geometry to be smooth as it is with the built-in displaceable objects (e.g. Planet, Cube etc.) but that isn't true with imported polygon models so it produces discontinuities.

[WAS]

At the moment it relies on the underlying geometry to be smooth

Which makes sense high poly models seem to look fine, as those polygons are so dense you can't see any continuity issues. I don't get any of these issues on the same shader ball I shared years ago on the high poly version I exported.

Seems the industry is moving away from "low poly" objects anyways, even in Unreal Engine with dynamic mesh poly calculation based on z depth. UE5 expects as high as poly objects as possible.

[WAS]

Zooming in on the object you can barely make out the problem issue. Though this couldn't be subdivided anymore [in poseray, a proper 64bit application may be able to] so a real fix would be prudent.

[Hannes]

Thanks, Matt and Jordan!!

[Hannes]

Seems the facets are still there, even when "Distort by normal" is unchecked, as long as "Lead-in warp effect" is not set to "None".
Probably for the same reason.

[Dune]

Thanks Matt! And sorry for not reading up beforehand  
And your compromise looks good, Hannes.