Having issues with my baking my Normal Map for my chair prop

kevingamerartist

Hi all,

I'm having issues with baking my Normal Map properly for my chair prop here in Substance Painter. I don't know what these weird lines are and everything. Everything else on the model seems to be alright, but I can't figure out where these are coming from. Is it something that I need to do with my low or high poly model in Maya? Or am I not setting up the settings correctly when baking the textures? Or is that a different map that is being applied?

Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

NoRank

exploding the mesh or making a proper cage should fix this

kevingamerartist

@NoRank: I did both exploding the mesh and making a proper cage for it, and this is what I got. I don't think it's baking correctly. I'm not getting a Normal Map baked or anything when I applied those.

AtticusMars

99% of the time when your bake is picking up other objects in the scene it is because your cage is misaligned, too far away from your high poly, or too close to it.

Your cage is used to determine where your rays start casting from, if it is too far away it will pick up anything between the cage and the target mesh. If it is too close, it might penetrate the mesh and cast rays through it, picking up anything behind it that it hits.

Exploding shouldn't be necessary with Substance bakes because it has name matching which is easier to use.

kevingamerartist

@AtticusMars: how do you determine if your cage is properly aligned?

AtticusMars

Just look at it? It should occupy the same space as the mesh

kevingamerartist

Well I mean when I'm zoomed in it looks fine, but when I zoom out, then the high poly mesh seems to be sticking out. Does the cage need to be outside of the high poly while zoomed out in Maya?

kevingamerartist

Even after messing with the cage some more, for some odd reason the high poly is still not baking properly on to the low poly in Substance Painter.

I tried baking the Normal Map without a cage file, and I'm still getting the same results.

NoRank

That's weird then, you can try to use the matching by name of substance painter but idk. Maybe your highpoly is way different from your low poly or something like this, but I'm pretty sure that the chair's back piece is causing this.

Try to move the chair's back piece away in other axis.

kevingamerartist

So what I've figured out a little bit is with this model at least is that if I have the whole low poly model covering the high poly model, then it bakes correctly. So I can't have a separate layer for my cage at all. I don't know if that's common or not when doing the baking process, but it's working for this model