trying to paint this SciFi bolt on substance painter but keeps on generating this ugly dark shadow on the geometry! UV's are correct and smoothing groups also!! Please help???
Hi @F5_official So i'm no professional but theres a couple of things you can do to troubleshoot it!
Assuming you are using your low poly mesh to cast the rays for the normal:
1. Try welding the problem face with the corresponding faces to make a more complete UV island, at the moment its just a single face but welding the edges could help.
2. I can see you have a cap on top of your screw head, make sure to use Painters naming convention to ensure the two objects are baking their normals separately and have no overlapping rays (_high and _low), also you may have deleted a face which would have connected to the top edge of the problem face (Underneath your upper cap for the bolt) to save on polygons, this is good for polycounts but can be bad for Ray casting since it uses the vert position to cast from. So make sure theres faces attached to those edges even if they are underneath ( you can always delete them later)
3. Lastly, Make a cage! Duplicate your lowpoly, add a few subdivisions all over, scale up uniformly in all directions by lets say .3 or so and export that as your cage.
Hopefully this helped, if I didn't explain anything very well let me know and I'll make some images to show you what I mean
Replies
So i'm no professional but theres a couple of things you can do to troubleshoot it!
Assuming you are using your low poly mesh to cast the rays for the normal:
1. Try welding the problem face with the corresponding faces to make a more complete UV island, at the moment its just a single face but welding the edges could help.
2. I can see you have a cap on top of your screw head, make sure to use Painters naming convention to ensure the two objects are baking their normals separately and have no overlapping rays (_high and _low), also you may have deleted a face which would have connected to the top edge of the problem face (Underneath your upper cap for the bolt) to save on polygons, this is good for polycounts but can be bad for Ray casting since it uses the vert position to cast from. So make sure theres faces attached to those edges even if they are underneath ( you can always delete them later)
3. Lastly, Make a cage! Duplicate your lowpoly, add a few subdivisions all over, scale up uniformly in all directions by lets say .3 or so and export that as your cage.
Hopefully this helped, if I didn't explain anything very well let me know and I'll make some images to show you what I mean