Beginner Baker needs your help :(

ojna14

So i've been trying to bake this for the past few days, this is a part of a swivel on a caster wheel.

The workflow i've done is first creating a low poly mesh in maya and then duplicating it to create the high poly mesh. On the high poly mesh, i've made the edges rounder but all within the low poly models' bounds. 

Then I've finished the uv map and then tried to bake them on substance painter. Here's the result.
I've been trying to make the whole edge of the whole poly round or am I having a big wrong move here that I don't understand. I've been trying to replicate this effect from a model that i've seen on artstation as you can see below.
(maybe this is important, i got this shot from a marmoset viewer file on artstation and this model is NOT MINE)

As you can see, this artist achieved creating his normals and rounding off the edge just fine. How am I supposed to achieve this?

Thank you for taking your time off this question, it'll greatly help me.

Brandon.LaFrance

The artist in your example is using a transparency map to effectively cut out that corner of the geometry and give the impression of a curve. The trade off here is that there is that the part has no thickness. The normal map gives a good illusion of depth, but if you look at it from directly in front you will see that its just a plane with no thickness.

ojna14

Woah you're right! I've checked it again and that seems to be the case. But is it possible to bake normal maps? or do i have to do it manually in PS?

Brandon.LaFrance

Sure you can bake normal maps, there's nothing about a plane that prevents that. As far as baking the transparency/opacity it can be done directly in Substance Designer, but not Painter. As a work around in Painter, you could bake an ID map with no UV padding, then throw it in Photoshop to convert it to grayscale, make some quick levels adjustments, and then use that as your opacity. For something as simple as this, I would just paint the opacity directly in Painter.

EarthQuake

You've got two primary problems:

1. You don't have enough faces to represent the curve. Normal maps do a good job of faking smaller details but they can't fake the silhouette of an object.

2. Your low poly mesh entirely encapsulates your high poly mesh. This is a common mistake, what you really want is for your low poly mesh to be as close to the surface as the high poly as possible. This will mean intersecting and sticking out at some points, rather than covering completely.

Both of these are explained in the "Best Results" section here: https://marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/ - (This is for Toolbag but the general concepts apply to all baking apps.)