[Blender 2.8] Normal Map Baking

morepolys

I've done many bakes before and my typical workflow is to add a hardedge on UV breaks at 90 degree areas.  I've done this a million times in Maya to Painter into Unity with no issues.

I am just wondering is this the same workflow when baking inside of Blender? Or am i just staring at this too long and missed something completely simple?

Here is the mesh with UV islands broken at 90 degree angles with padding and mark sharp on the UV boundaries 



Here is the baked version with the normal map applied (notice the seamage, I did a Pack UV of .05)


If I remove all sharps and set smooth and bake I get this, which looks great in Blender but looks like crap everywhere else


And lastly this is the same model in image 1 (hard edges applied to UV borders) baked inside of Painter looking good


Funny thing is if i take the Substance baked one and apply it in Blender it works perfectly.  I am sure this has been run into at some point by Blender users, Im still new to the software so perhaps I am missing something?

Udjani

You need to use a cage in blender if you will bake with sharp edges, Both painter and marmoset do this automatically.

morepolys

Ahh! That was it, got it to work thanks for the quick reply.

So if cage is disabled what is the Ray Distance value doing then?  I figured it was the same as Painter?

Udjani

It's just that, ray distance, quick way to not get overlaps when baking. I feel like it should have an option to average the normals too since ray distance is kind of a fake cage, but it does not.

realeyez

Just out of curiosity, does the bake result in the second image display correctly if you bring the mesh and normal map Blender baken into Painter, or does Blender just bake it out wrong? 

morepolys

It shades the same outside of Blender. As Udjani said all you need to do is create a cage (duplicate low, push out a bit), after that it worked perfectly.