Low quality normal map Substance Painter

SB_Potato

So I'm trying to bake a high poly model on a low poly model with the size of 58 meter x 64 meter, my bake is really blurry even when I bake on 4k with 8x AA. Does anyone know the problem? If any information is needed I'll answer it.

Here is my UV:


Here is a 2K, 8X AA bake:


Here is a 4K, 8X AA bake:


As you see even 4k isn't that much sharper, so does anyone know the problem?
Thanks in advance!

- Gerwin

Obscura

Yes. You would get much better result by using a little  bit more geometry on the lowpoly, and just let some bevels do the edge smoothness of a 60 meters big object. You would only increase the tris count by little amount, and you wouldn't need a 4k texture. Sounds much better to me.

I see you also have some issues with mismatched smoothing - uv splits.

SB_Potato

Obscura said:

Yes. You would get much better result by using a little  bit more geometry on the lowpoly, and just let some bevels do the edge smoothness of a 60 meters big object. You would only increase the tris count by little amount, and you wouldn't need a 4k texture. Sounds much better to me.

I see you also have some issues with mismatched smoothing - uv splits.

Oh okay, so I need to bevel the edges of the lowpoly, but what makes the bake so low quality, like really blurry/pixelated. And how do i fix uv splits? By making the edges soft?

Obscura

You get "blurry" result because 1 you waste the 70% of the texture space on the overlapping planes 2 you are trying to put edge softness from a 4k texture on a 60meters big object. so you have very low pixel density (about 70 pixels per meter).

To fix the mismatched smoothing-uvs, there is generally one rule... Whenever you split your smoothing group, you also need to split the uvs (and also to put some padding on them).

You can also check out this thread, it has some good info about this topic:

http://polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts#latest

You should do this with tiling textures anyways.