Substance Painter - weird shadow marks, what am I doing wrong?

Jsummers

Hi, I'm a complete newbie to 3D modelling and baking and so I've come across an issue that I can't seem to fix. After creating my low poly, high poly and cage in Maya, and then baking them in substance painter I keep getting weird marks and I don't understand whats causing it. 

Ashervisalis

In the second image, the faces from the tube are baking onto the flat plane. That's why its a good idea to explode your mesh. If you have your cage between the tube and the flat plane, it'll prevent that weird shadow. Maybe try baking by mesh name? Although I was never able to get that to work properly.

AgelosAp

Baking by name or exploding is right, for name matching just go with partname_high to partname_low, your exporting app should support that though, for instance zbrush can't export names of subtools in .obj as far as I know, I use fbx instead.
The first image is probably due to a low-ish resolution trying to bake a straight line so it gets jagged as there aren't enough pixels to simulate it. If there wasn't supposed to be anything there at all, maybe try a higher padding?

Jsummers

hey, I will try those solutions, thank you both for such good answers. 

jessnado

For the first image you can also increase your AA if youre looking for a smooth line instead of getting those jagged edges. Highly also recommend baking by mesh name or exploding, whichever is easier for you!

Westley

I have found that no matter how hard I work for a solid bake I end up with some "Artifacts" now and again. Such as what is seen in your photos most of the time I find its easier to just paint out these baking errors either in Substance Painter or in another program such as Photoshop check this out-
https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Normal+Map+Painting
Hope that helps!