Substance Painter, normal map errors when baking with multiple meshes together

LordoftheGoombas

I'm modeling in Maya, exporting with FBX, and using Substance Painter to bake the maps. I'm using bake by mesh name, but I'm getting some really weird results that are acting as if the baker is still reading other meshes.  



Now if I take each individual element and bake it separate, I get the results I expect, but when I bake them together, with bake by mesh name, I get these annoying artifacts. I checked all my names for each mesh and I don't think that is the problem.  Any help would be appreciated, and thanks for your time.

kanga

If you have one model and you want to bake by name then you have to break the model up. You export the separate elements as one fbx (for example). Each element has its own uvs and if named properly they import into substance as  separate texture sets. If you are strapped for texture space you  can handle the model as a single object. do the uvs,  split the model into separate parts, bake the model, then later combine the model back into one object in your 3d app and merge the separate textures in an image editing app.

However I read here that that isnt such a hot idea because substance includes alot of information in its texture that gets wiped by, say PS.

LordoftheGoombas

Hey thanks for the reply!   So I currently have my model completely separated into different meshes, if something remotely touches something else it's a separate mesh with a separate name.  As for the uvs I have four different uv maps each assigned to a different material, with no overlapping within the same material, (outside of things I purposely mean to overlap which I have moved out of the uv space by one unit, as is the norm).  I have one fbx file for the low, and one for the high.  That's why I'm stuck, it acts as if there is mesh that is not properly separated, but this is in fact not the case, and as far as I can tell I've done everything correctly.  To further explain my problem, I'm working on a plane, if I bake the tail alone, perfect bake.  If I bake the tail + the tail flaps, slight errors but it's not too bad, if I bake the tail + the flaps + the body, you get the quite noticeable errors I pictured above in the second picture, and the tail and body aren't even the same material/uv map. I just completely don't understand.  I've considered your last suggestion as this may be my only solution if I can't figure out what is going haywire in my bake, but definitely want to avoid that rout, for your reasons stated, plus if I have to re-bake it means that huge amount of work will have to be done again.

Revel

I'm guessing you have a UV on a single mesh spread across multiple IDs? If you use cage for this situation, yeah I got the same overlapping issue last time. If that's the case you can try to bake without using cage?

LordoftheGoombas

Thanks for replying! What do you mean by a UV on a single mesh spread across multiple IDs?  And I'm currently not using a cage for this bake, I'm using Substance Painter's Averaged Normal baking .

Revel

I mean let say you have a table and chair props and you unwrap them to fit into 2 texture sheets. so some of the UVs for the table are on the texture sheet no.1 and some on on.2 and vice versa with the chair. But if you said you're not using cage then that can't be the problem.

Have you tried to reduced the Max Frontal/ Rear Distance setting on painter?

LordoftheGoombas

Ah ok, I I understand what you mean now.  As per your suggestion I tried messing with frontal and rear distance settings, still getting the error.  Reducing the numbers somewhat reduced the problem spots, but every other part of the model starts to look far worse for it.  I'm starting to think it's just some fluke error, as this is the only project I have encountered this problem on. 

poopipe

Bake by name works,  it'll be worth double  checking your names just in case. 

 bear in mind that projection distances are relative to the bounding box by default so the further it is from a perfect cube, the less even your projection distance is. 

I've found (over hundreds of projects) the best setting to start with for frontal/rear  distances is 0.01/0.5