Weird Baking Artifacts

apollo580

I've been having some trouble getting my bakes to look decent in substance painter. Below are some pictures of the issues, you can see weird artifacts on my mesh.

http://imgur.com/NjVm3CR

http://imgur.com/1AepuyF

http://imgur.com/QkQOyXa

http://imgur.com/lWFCp4J

My high res model looks fine and it lines up pretty well with my low res model. My process in Maya LT is to "Set to Face" the normals and then turn on mesh smoothing in the Mesh Display >Soften Edge menu. I then export with the settings "Smoothing Groups", and "Triangulate" on.

Once I import into Substance Painter I make sure that "Compute Tangent Space per Fragment" is checked off. In the bake textures window I have the following checked off:

- Relative to bounding box

- Average Normals

- Ignore Backface

Anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

Thank you!

Froyok

Try triangulating your low poly mesh in Maya instead, not with the FBX export.

apollo580

Froyok said:

Try triangulating your low poly mesh in Maya instead, not with the FBX export.

Just tried it and had no luck. It looks like the edges are weird even in Maya, here is a picture of me looking over the mesh without selecting it.

http://imgur.com/eDqjJ6i

Froyok

Hmmm, could you show the wireframe of this area on your high-poly mesh ?

apollo580

Froyok said:

Hmmm, could you show the wireframe of this area on your high-poly mesh ?

Below is the wireframe of the high-poly mesh:

http://imgur.com/kMv9Z4m

I used decimation master to get it as low as possible without looking weird

I don't know if it matters but my model is very tiny because I did the high poly in Zbrush and then retopologized in Topogun. So my model is pretty damn small and will need to scaled up, does that have any effect on baking?

oblomov

It could be a combination of the small scale with the extremely thin triangles in your high poly mesh causing numerical precision issues. The latter are more likely the cause than the former (because that is where the rendering issues are in the screenshots you posted). If scaling up the mesh does not solve the problem, I would suggest replacing the thin triangles with less thin ones.

apollo580

oblomov said:

It could be a combination of the small scale with the extremely thin triangles in your high poly mesh causing numerical precision issues. The latter are more likely the cause than the former (because that is where the rendering issues are in the screenshots you posted). If scaling up the mesh does not solve the problem, I would suggest replacing the thin triangles with less thin ones.

Thank you so much! That was the issue! I used the undecimated model and the artifacts disappeared and it looks much much better!

Thank you Froyok for your help as well!