Substance Painter Baking problems - Seams, Seams everywhere!!

DanielPeres

Hey guys, 

I need some help with some baking problems that I am having in SP. I have tried everything I could think of to solve this issue but I just can't get to it so maybe someone can shed some light on it. When I bake the normal map I get some shading errors in my UV seams like this (first image is with an 88k normal map bake):





This is the normal map applied in the mesh:



Geometry:

"Smoothing groups":


UVs:


All the infos that I am trying to remember that might be relevant:
- The project is supposed to be 2k, even thought I tried to bake the normal at 8k and got the same results;
- Most meshes where I have this problems are all with soft edges but I already tried to add some hard edges in multiple places, including uv shell borders;
- I tried to unlock normals in Maya and tried multiple export settings;
- I tried to bake in xnormal and got similar results

I have never had this kind of seams problem before, yeah I had some smaller seams that could be noticed but I could get away with that, but in this project I am having seams in the normal in most of the uv shell borders

Hope someone can help me to get some kind of fix for this.
Thanks in advance

Mink

Edge padding and texture dilation. You wanna seperate UV faces at hars angles, especially when baking in bevel, otherwise it creates this wierd effect where the bevel mostly bakes, but in the middle it can't figure out what to color that 45 degree angle and leaves an artifact. Also, baking is only so powerful, and it struggles in certain situations. Ie it can properly bake on bevels on a calendar, but removing, edge loops on a cylanders low poly results in wierd artifacts. I can't see your high poly, but thats what this looks like. I can post examples if you want.

DanielPeres

Mink said:

Edge padding and texture dilation. You wanna seperate UV faces at hars angles, especially when baking in bevel, otherwise it creates this wierd effect where the bevel mostly bakes, but in the middle it can't figure out what to color that 45 degree angle and leaves an artifact. Also, baking is only so powerful, and it struggles in certain situations. Ie it can properly bake on bevels on a calendar, but removing, edge loops on a cylanders low poly results in wierd artifacts. I can't see your high poly, but thats what this looks like. I can post examples if you want.

Hey Mink, that does make sense and I will definitely give it a try right away, altought if you could post some examples it would be nice to learn some new things what seems awkward in this situation is that I am getting this seams in almost every uv border. With what you said in mind I tried:
- Separating the uvs whenever there are hard angles or this 45º bevels;
- I have tried making the uv cuts in different edges;
- Using both hard and smooth edges;

The only thing that solves this problem is obviously joining the uvs together ehere there are this seams, but of course that can't be a fix because some of this forms are impossible to be all together.



Highpoly of the mesh:

High and LowPoly together:


Also, this seams are happening in a lot of different places in different meshes in this project, like this one: 

DanielPeres

I grabbed the Handle mesh from the same model to try and figure out what is goind on, and at the moment I didn't find anything that could fix this situation. The handle is a somewhat cylindrical shape so there shouldn't be problems with hard angles, but here is what I get:




This gets more noticed with other materiais and that is why I am trying to adress it so bad, because I just went on in the project to further find that this edges would be really noticiable in the final texturing process.

I tried to make the UV's of only the handle the size of the whole UV space, it got better because the edge was kind of smoother, but it was still there, which means this can't be a problem about resolution or padding for sure:

Mink

Alright, first of all, your UVs are still far too compact. Space out all faces that go beyond a 33 degree angle.  Give them 32 pixels of space from other islands in a 4k texture. 16 in 2k, 8 in 1k etc.

In painter make sure your bakers look like this:



High and low poly:



Bad UVscc:



Good UVs:


Second you're too aggressive with your poly-count reduction. Let me demonstrate.



Models, Middle will be highpoly in both images



Bad 16 face Low Poly Bake: 



Good 32 face low poly bake:




You seem to be making both mistakes in your screenshots, hope this was helpful, don't hesitate to ask any more questions.