Strange Normal Map Problem

nak1411

I cannot figure out what is going on with my normal map.  I exported my low poly .fbx from 3ds max as well as high poly .obj and am baking with Substance Painter. I have no flipped normals, no overlapping uvs, no duplicated geo, and my smoothing groups are correct.  However, I am getting messed up, green normals on my mag and bolt carrier parts and I am at a total loss as to why.  I played around with the bake settings in Substance but to no avail.  I am thinking it has to be a geometry issue because the rest of the gun turned out great.  Anyone ever see this or have any ideas? Thanks is advance.

Marvin Mann

Have you tried removing everything other than the green parts and baking just that? Have you tried xNormal? 

nak1411

Yeah xNormal gave me the same problem.  Here it is baked separately.  I have a feeling it is some kind of novice mistake but I am racking my brain right now.

m4dcow

Have you checked the normals on your high poly model, those might be flipped.

huffer

Also try "resetting" the high poly object: create a cube and attach the high poly mesh, then remove cube in sub-object mode.

defragger

do Reset XForm. Then convert to editable Mesh and convert back to editable Poly again.
This should work!

Also check backface culling for if you normals are flipped inside out like m4dcow said.

Mark Dygert

I think M4DCOW might be onto something, it looks like an internal projection? Are the normals on the low poly inside out? If you apply an edit normals modifier to the low poly are the normals pointing in or out? Flip them if the are facing the wrong way.

Next up, are there overlapping UV shells? You should offset all but one shell, outside of the renderable area. To do that, select the shells you want to offset and in the lower right of the UV editor click the "Absolute /relative" button then in the "U" Box type 1 and hit enter, then turn the button off. That way those shells won't bake but they will land exactly "1" tile to the right.

Marvin Mann

The red part at the top of the magazine and on the small handle could also be a problem with either very thin geometry or low/high poly geometry not aligning properly. And o those models have geometry on the inside? (not overlapping but actual, thin geometry) It seems that you have at least some very thin geometry on other parts of the gun. Easiest solution is to remove such geometry, but scaling up both high and low poly might work too.

nak1411

It ended up being that I had to reset xform and collapse those parts on the high poly.  Strange how it only affected those 2 parts and not anything else.  But it is fixed.  Thanks for all the help guys!

musashidan

It's probably because you may have scaled those 2 parts at the object level at some stage. It's always good practice to reset xforms on all meshes when modeling is complete.