Chances are if you’re reading this, you probably want to know how to stop your Virtual Texture normals looking like this:

A collage of images of assets with very badly behaved normals.

Okay so that’s more of an interpretation of how it felt trying to get the normals to work; but for an actual example:

Two carved pillars, the one on the left has bad normals, the one on the right looks quite nice.

The one on the left uses the standard ‘invert green’ normal setup. The one on the right:

Separate the Color output of the Normal image texture; invert green as usual, connecting it to the Green of a Combine Colour node. Connect the Blue to the Blue. Now connect the Alpha of the Normal image texture to the Red of Combine Color.

Two carved pillars without colour applied, next to their respective Normal node trees. The one on the top/left has bad normals, the one on the bottom/right looks quite nice.

I’ll put a nodegroup up here later on once I’ve figured out the best way to share them; maybe just a .blend once I’ve gotten a nice little hoard of fix-groups like this.

Hope this is helpful to someone out here.

-Harpoon