Investigating error(s) in Normal maps for use in Maya

Keith01

So for the past few days I've been doing some experiments with Maya and seeing the best approach to Normal maps and how they exactly work.

I've read:

• You're making me hard. Making sense of hard edges, uvs, normal maps and vertex counts
• Understanding averaged normals and ray projection/Who put waviness in my normal map?
• Skew you buddy! Making sense of skewed normal map details.

I've watched plenty of videos on it such as...

• Vertex Normals in Maya- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xB7nb0E448&t=8s
• The Fundamentals of Perfect Baking - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww
• 3D Motive - Intro To Normal Maps

The problem I'm having with this particular cube is the edges/UV edges.
To make things easier I've deleted the bottom and top face.

Checklist

• UV is separating wherever there is a hard edge(Since I deleted the top and bottom faces there really isn't any need to split the UV's)
• The Low Poly has smoothing groups/has been smoothed.
• Cage is the same Geometry as Low Poly 

Normal Map settings

• 4096 
• padding = 32
• Tangent Space Normal check
• xyz +

x-Normal Normal Map - a bit of blurriness at the edges but that stays consistent throughout so not too worried that's causing the issue.


Substance Normal Map


Maya and Substance Painter Viewports

Substance Painter does a better job of hiding the sharp edge but it's still there and my focus is to render in Maya.

Which Edges are messing up?

I've highlighted and separated one


If anyone can help me figure this out it would be great. 

I could fix this by maybe duplicating the good side over but I'd rather understand this problem so I can avoid it again in the future.

Thanks to anyone who can help.

Flmn

For what I see here - all your edges on LP are hard (each poly have its own smoothing group). So first of all - separate all the UV shells. However, in this particular object (because of bevels) you can also make all edges soft and then sew all the UV shells in one strip - there will be some gradients, but overall result gonna be fine.
Also - if you make your edges soft and wont change UV - it should work too.

Keith01

Thank for the reply Flmn,

Thanks for the suggestion. However my LP is all smoothed and there are no hard edges as you can see in my second last image, if there was any hard edges they would have two vertex normal's on each vertex.

However, I did try and connect all the edges together and the seams disappeared on the new UV.

But the quality has dipped a lot and you can see a fair bit of gradients but I would prefer this over black edges.

I'll work on getting better results.

thanks.