Hi,

So I have always had issues with getting Houdini to work well with normal maps. However I was just playing around with normal maps and environment lights and noticed that my normal map was looking a lot better then when I used it with area lights. Any ideas why this is? Also any tips for working with normal maps in Houdini would be great. Here is my test file so you can see what I mean.

Also whenever I try to use the suggested setup for tangent normal maps I get this weird hard shadow as shown in this file.