[Solved] Substance Painter Baking - Shading & Triangle Artefacts?

robusgun

I've been working on a fully modeled colt revolver but have have gotten stuck in baking from my high to low in Substance Painter. Things I have made sure to use: 'Match By Mesh Name', adjusting the rear & frontal distances, put dilation to max, turn on anti-aliasing to 2x2. I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out what is causing these issues, I am working in Blender so I have tried setting the low poly to smooth shading, I've also tried using auto-smooth so that the planar faces are flat but then I find that hard edges have not been giving great results. I have never posted a question before, this has become sort of a last resort for me. I really appreciate any and all advice, so thank you in advance.

THE ISSUES:

1. There are weird light shading issues on the low poly.


2. When I triangulate the model to avoid texture distortion issues between programs, the triangles are showing up.


3. The long thin polygons are showing up. (I modeled it this way, trying to be efficient with the low poly.)

THE INFO:

Substance Painter Bake Settings

Low Poly Shading

Low Poly Wireframe


High Poly Model.


Low Poly & High Poly Overlapping


Sorry for the big post. Thanks for looking through all of this!

Udjani

The shading gradients in the low poly are too extremes even for a sync workflow, you should use some hard edges or extra loops to hold it more. If you use auto smooth you need a uv break every part of the mesh that have hard edges.

tho the shading in the handle looks good enough. Try baking it without anti-aliasing. 

poopipe

Show us the UVs and also its usually a good idea to extend the rear projection a bit 

robusgun

Udjani said:

The shading gradients in the low poly are too extremes even for a sync workflow, you should use some hard edges or extra loops to hold it more. If you use auto smooth you need a uv break every part of the mesh that have hard edges.

tho the shading in the handle looks good enough. Try baking it without anti-aliasing. 

Thanks @Udjani for the advice I am now trying out the bake with autosmoothing and uv breaks on hard edges. I will post my results soon!

robusgun

poopipe said:

Show us the UVs and also its usually a good idea to extend the rear projection a bit 

Thanks @poopipe I'll try increase the rear projection.

There are a lot of pieces in this project so I have divided it up into 3 sections/ 3 UV Maps. I am currently trying out autosmoothing and uv breaks on hard edges with *UV Map 2, if the results are good I'll use the same techniques on the other 2 uv maps. Here they are right now:

UV Map 1

Section 1 - UV Map 1


*UV Map 2

*Section 2 - UV Map 2


UV Map 3

Section 3 - UV Map 3

robusgun

Thanks @Udjani and @poopipe. I have now got great baking results, and now I also have a much better understanding of the importance of shading in a high poly to low poly bake. In the end I got these results using autosmooth at 180, with sharp edges to support areas with bad shading and on general sharp edges. I also made sure that uv splits coincided with all sharp edges. Cheers guys!