Normal Map Issues (Newbie)

FuzzyOwl

Hey guys,
I know this gets brought up a hell of a lot, and Ive gone over several of the threads concerning the fundamentals of Normal mapping but I just cant seem to wrap my head around it.
I'm trying to bake out a desk that I work on for a scene I am creating for my portfolio -
My workflow that I use is Maya (subdiv proxy modelling) -> Substance Painter (for the normal map bakes). I use a cage taken from my low, I UV map using Headus UVlayout and Ive tried following tutorials regarding the fundamentals of perfect baking.

My Exploded low poly -


My High poly using Subdiv -



My UV layout is as follows -



I tried to keep each section of my model grouped and kept everything to scale when resizing for placing on the 1,1 space of the UV.
The problems I am having are once I try to bake out in Substance Painter  using my cage and exploded mesh, I get some artifact issues on my normal map and after trying up the resolution of the bakes and increasing the ray distancing I still get the same problems.

This is my exploded model after baking using basic settings for normal maps in Substance Painter 1 -



As you can see it is baking the larger object perfectly, however in  the same bake I get edge tearing on the smaller objects such as -



Sorry if this is poor presentation, if you need anything else screenshot wise I'm more than happy to provide, I just want to understand what it is I am doing wrong and fix it so I don't keep getting stumped by Normal Mapping, any help is greatly appreciated.

FuzzyOwl

I forgot to add the Normal map bake from Substance, sorry guys!   -

Dumbanana

If I had to guess, the simplest thing to check would be that those UV shells have enough texture space.  From the screenshots you provided doesn't look like they have a lot of texture space available to them.  Try scaling them up and re-baking?

musashidan

For this particular model I wouldn't even bother with an NM. Your large cylindrical shapes have dense topology and you can see that zero info has baked from high to low on these parts. And you could add a rounded bevel to the tabletop as physical geo. Your tabletop edges are very sharp and won't be read well(rule of thumb for baking bevels is to exaggerate them)

I'm with injun joe. Those parts are artifacting because they only occupy a few pixels of texture space.

Also, your uvs are far from optimal. You could stack the tabletops and legs and delete the top side geo of the bracket that will never be seen to gain more texture space.

Substance Painter can bake by mesh name tags so exploding the bake is unnecessary. 

FuzzyOwl

Thanks loads for the feedback guys, its exactly what I needed. I took what you both said on board and tried to re-scale the parts of the model so they take up more pixel space on the UV. Also I beveled the edges on the tabletop and softened the edge in Maya before cutting so it gave me the same effect as my normal map would have. I added the same single bevel and soft edge to the legs on the bottom of the table (unsure if this is needed based on what the player would see/their size). I also redid my UV's to try and better optimize them, stacking the tabletop parts and also the legs. If you see anything else that could be improved I would love more CC, I'll pop up a textured image soon.

Thanks again guys, here's the new UV's -



An Image of the model inside substance with no normal map -



I circled the beveled edges and the sharp edge is to match the sharp angle on the leg on my table at home, I hope this reads okay -