Strange artifacts when using bump

Hi there,

I’m working on a production that requires us to visualise a new product.
I’ve run into a problem when creating a material for a piece of the product, when applying the material as seen in the image below. when applied the polygons of the actual mesh are shown as strange shading artifacts.

The sphere shown in the image is a default sphere, set to smooth and i applied a subdivision surface. very basic stuff.

Does anyone have any idea what might cause this, and how to fix it?


It’s an artifact of how bump mapping works. Normal smoothing and bump/normal mapping work by using a “fake” surface for some shading calculations. However, if this fake surface becomes too different from the actual mesh, artifacts like this show up. The only solutions are to lower your bump map strength, or subdivide the object more.