Need help understanding xnormal, Knald and Substance painter

winterstone

Hi Im a little mixed up lol. Too much information and it's jumbled in my tiny brain.

I'm a hobbyist and I understand somewhat of how to get high poly detail from a high poly mesh onto a low poly mesh using normal maps in xnormal from exports from zbrush. What I don't seem to grasp are normal maps that are created by Substance Painter.

How do you get your high poly details on to a low poly mesh in substance painter? Or can you even do that?

Ideally I want to be able to paint my textures in substance painter so can I not use Xnormal?

Also what is Knald exactly. Is it an alternative to XNormal?

I'd appreciate anyone's thoughts and clarity on this subject. Thanks

pior

Substance Painter has a built-in baker. You set your project to show your lowpoly file, point the baker to your highpoly model file, and bake maps just like Xnormal (or Knald) would do. Substance Painter is just a little bit convoluted in that regard because high and low are specified in two very different places of the program (project settings and baker). It makes sense once you get the hang of it, but it definitely is counter-intuitive and in my opinion is in need of  some serious refactoring.

winterstone

Oh wow. Thanks a lot for that clarifying. That makes more sense. I couldn't understand which model to load and how it sees the detail from the other mesh. 

pior

No problem

Don't hesitate to report your experience to Allegorithmic since feedback from new users on the discoverability of the program (or lack thereof) is certainly very valuable to them. They already put a great error prevention/hand holding system in place for resource importing (the popup showing up when attempting to do File>Import resource is one of the most clever UX decision I have ever seen ! It seems like a bit of a hack, but this is actually genius), so it would only make sense for them to treat the baker similarly - with the addition of a step by step baking wizard for instance.