Trying out Substance Painter demo

Bigg__D

I've been trying to improve my low poly/normal mapping skills, I used an existing model piece I had done a while back before tackling something with more parts/complexity. Its just magpuls UBR stock, finally really understood smoothing groups with this one, looks fine in the Max viewport with the 3p studio realtime shader. I just want to know why Substance painter displays the mesh like this, shown without the normal map applied, even with the normal there is similar shading issues. Do I have to update the video driver? Is the low-poly geometry just trash on my part? Is there a certain format or setting that SP prefers? I would like to buy SP soon

Bek

If that's not what your lowpoly smoothing is supposed to look like (since you don't specifically say, nor show us what it should be), then there's a few possibilities. It could be max failing to export your vertex normals properly - check export settings and/or try a different mesh format. Alternatively it could be SP failing to read the mesh data correctly (unlikely).

If the shading is correct but it's just the normal map that appears wrong in SP then it could be that you didn't export the mesh with the same triangulation you baked with, or you imported the normal map as an openGL (Y+) normal map when what you likely wanted was DirectX (Y-).

It's probably not related but if the substance painter log mentions your current video drivers are out of date, consider updating those too.

Bigg__D

Ok thanks for the reply. The low poly smoothing definitely is wrong as displayed in SP & I would assume my smoothing groups were done correctly since the normal baked properly & displays fine with no seams in Max. You mention vertex normals, thats interesting I'll look into it but the only other format I could use is FBX & Max exporter crashes, but thats my problem not anything related here. Again this isnt a normal map issue, I could take a basic object, export it out of Max & it still does not look correct in SP, the paint brush seems to follow the contours of the light rather than surface geometry which is weird. I mean, when I watch a video tutorial for SP, I see the low poly just flat white looks fine, no pinching or light distortions. I dont know how else to explain it, I never really ask questions about this stuff maybe this is just another thing where the solution will somehow reveal itself when it wants to & I'll figure out its something simple. Bottom line is why does it look like garbage in SP thats all

Froyok

What FBX version are you using ? We don't support FBX 2016 yet (fallback to 2015 instead).