Substance Baking - Geometry baking onto other geometry

adamrice117

Hey fellow artists, 

This is my first Polycount post, after several months of being a member and looking through the site. I always find helpful information so I'm hoping someone can shed some light onto an issue I'm running into. I have a question regarding normal baking in Substance Painter, which I'm fairly new to using.

I have a desk here which I'm trying to bake three materials at once. The geometry of the desk handles is baking onto the drawers behind them. I have a small idea why, but I thought since I have three separate materials this would not happen. I've tried increasing/decreasing the Max Frontal and Rear Distances. There are three materials, one for the Desk, Handles, and Floor, all on one UV Set in Maya. I exported one mesh as the low poly "desk_low," and one for the high poly, "desk_high." When I bake the mesh maps, these are my parameters:



Here are the UV shells of all parts of the asset, including the floor, desk, and metal handles:


Metal Handles


Floor boards


All wood parts of the desk

Here is a close-up of the baking error, which projects the handles onto the drawers themselves:



Thank you for reading through a taking a look! Your help is much appreciated. This is probably a simpler problem than it seems---

Revel

Read into a feature called 'match by name' which only bakes parts with matching _high and _low (providing you already set the name correctly before bring to painter).

You did mentioned about desk_high and desk_low, I'm assuming you name this as the .fbx file? you need to set the name of the mesh itself and change the 'Match' dropdown from 'Always' to 'By Mesh Name'.

adamrice117

Hi Revel,

Yes, those are the names for the fbx files.

I found this on Allegorithmic support. It worked successfully so that solved the problem!

The only thing now is it looks as if the ambient occlusion maps baked and multiplied over everything (before under Texture Settings the AO maps were gray and now they are black). Below are the occlusion bake parameters, and also the before/after bake screenshots after setting 'Always' to 'By Mesh Name,' which worked, other than this new problem. Also, I tried changing the parameter 'Self Occlusion' from 'Always' to 'Only Same Mesh Name,' and got the same dark result from the AO anyway. 

Thanks for taking time to help out Revel!

Revel

Hmm strange, your bake mesh maps all turns out black. Anything else you changed other then the match by name setting?
Is there any error on the log window?

poopipe

It's completely ignoring the high when set to match by name so I suspect the names don't match between the high and low res models.  

adamrice117

Hmmm, not that I know of. I kept all the settings the same while I tested one variable at a time. The result that seems to have worked, Revel, is that I changed the 'Attenuation' setting from 'Linear' to 'None.' (AO parameters screenshot is at the bottom of the post). The error while in Ambient Occlusion viewing mode is: [Material view] Cannot set the id slot: map selected is already used by ambient occlusion slot

Also, poopipe, I'm not sure how it could because the mesh names are "desk_high" and "desk_low," which is the example set on that Allegorithmic support page: https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/spdoc/matching-by-name-127074308.html





 

Revel

Hold on, did you manually slot in the baked mesh maps yourself? because the error you mentioned seems like you trying to slot an id baked map into your ao slot. Also I've look back at your previous screenshot, the ao slot seems like having a curvature map and curvature slot got ao map in there.

How does those ended up there?
When you use Painter to bake, it will auto assigned the correct maps into its respective slots.

Even on your Attenuation setting change to none, there's no ao baked in to your mesh.

adamrice117

I don't think I've manually slotted in the baked mesh maps. Maybe before they were because the maps were just solid black, but now does it look like the ao and curvature maps are loaded in correctly?

Revel

Yeah those are looks fine and it seems like now your ao baked correctly?

adamrice117

@Revel Indeed, thanks for your help!