Yet another normal baking issue

aggelostsif

So I am making all the models (low, high, cage) in Maya and I'm trying to bake the normals inside Substance Painter.
I have 3 texture sets with no overlapping or flipped UVs. The cages are made for every mesh by pushing the low poly verts by their normal till I fill the entire high poly so they have 100% the topology. I export everything with clean history and with some distance between each and make sure everything is lined up (low poly, high poly and cages).I export everything letting Painter calulate tangents & binormals. In the bake options I use the "Match per mesh name" option, obviously I "Use Cage" and I use the high and low name prefix (all my low polys end with "_low" and all high ones with "_high".

As you can see there is a weird artifact that I cannot really explain. It's as if the first two textures have the other two overlaid on them. The last normal map is intact for some reason...

*Note that if I do not use the cage everything works like a charm  but I want to use the cage in order to reduce the crazy normal gradients that are made. Also if I do every mesh alone, again everything works even with a cage. Where could the problem be?

AlecMoody

A few things- First cages just control projection direction/distance. They will not affect the appearance of gradients in your normal map.

Try re-importing those meshes back into maya. It looks like your 3 separate meshes are not very separate. I can see the mesh on the right overlayed onto both of the other maps.

aggelostsif

I noticed that as well. I mention the cage because if I don't use it, I don't have any errors at all. So that means that the meshes shouldn't have any merge issues between them. Anyways I tried exporting every material ID in a separate file and I fixed the problem. Just can't figure out where the issue is whenever I try to bake multiple maps for different texture sets in the same Painter scene.