Substance painter barrel test

hmm_rock

I finally decided to try my hand at substance painter. I've only done work with hand painted stuff for the last year and I sorely miss normal maps! Much of this (sculpt and bake) has been a lesson in relearning my old workflow so I have a few questions as well. I would greatly appreciate any help.

There are some wavy seams around where the wood and iron meet. I've read all the awesome post about baking that have been around lately, so I'm assuming this is caused by the high poly and low not being close enough/ the low not having enough supporting geo? It seemed silly to start adding edge loops to the barrel, so are the bake errors an acceptable trade-off for less geo?

Technically, shouldn't the uv seams between the metal and wood be split if they are separate smoothing groups?

I also wanted to compare the levels of detail substance painter can provide. Obviously the 512 is horribly blurry compared to the others. Is this an acceptable level of detail, or should I be concerned with the lack of definition?

Overall I'd really like feedback/critique on how to improve my texturing in substance, particularily on the wood. :poly122:



2048x2048


1024x1024


512x512

Voidspawn

So with a synced baking workflow, you wouldn't really need to split the normals where the metal rims are. Here's how I would most likely go about placing my UV seams/hard edges (split normals). Personally I would also give the rims a slight angle to help with the normal map bake. Adding more geo shouldn't be necessary, although of course you always get better results the more geo you throw into the mix.

In terms of the texture size and level of detail and all that jazz, it really just depends on your target. If it's a portfolio piece or personal practice, try to keep it at a size that's reasonable but still holds enough detail. Depends on a variety of factors as always.
For a "next gen" game you would probably find yourself importing it at 2k and just letting mips/in-engine settings take care of the downrezing. (Thinking mainly in terms of UE4 here)


Hopefully that answers some of the technical questions. I'm crap at giving artistic feedback so all I can say is look at reference and keep iterating.