Substance Painter: Can't bake normal map

goekbenjamin

Hi, somehow i am not able to bake a normal map from an easy mesh,
i have no clue what i do wrong:

high mesh called "testing_high"


there you can see the faces/border/vertices of it


this is the low mesh called "testing_low"

and its faces/border/vertices of it

this is the unwrapped uv (i know not best but for a demo it will do )


SO in SubstancePainter

i load the low mesh "testing_low"


than under the baking options i set "High def. mesh: testing_high"

i used "match by mesh name", played with frontal/rear distance, (de)activated "average normals"
and this is what i get

i dont know what i did wrong here?

If you would like to test it, i attached the the low/high mesh as objs

TheGabmeister

That's probably because your high-poly does not seem to have any beveled edges, which is expected from these kinds of shapes. And, you're trying to bake details with 90 degree slopes on a flat surface. Take a look on tutorials on how the rays in normal map baking actually work so that you'll understand why.

The Fundamentals of Perfect Baking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww

Common Baking Errors and How to Solve Them

http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC2/Common+XNormal+Baking+Errors+and+How+to+Solve+Them

goekbenjamin

Hey @TheGabmeister, thanks alot for those links!
Yes somehow i know that i missed something (or even multiple things) but i can not really nail it down what it is,
i will read it immediately!  

goekbenjamin

Okay although i am not quite sure if this was the problem, but i try to summarize for others,
so PLEASE correct me if i am wrong here (i dont want to misslead others because of my lack of knowledge)

the missing extrusion on top of the low mesh is because:
- the ray has to "travel much deeper to paint the normal" 
- and even if the extrusion on top where not so deep, the ray couold not "catch" the edges so try to slope them (look here on page 11 for more infos)

Additionaly here is a hughe source of infos