Blender to Substance : Baking Issues

OVERLORDger

Hi guys,

I need some help for my Substance Baker:
I did a low and a high Poly Model of a Bowie Knife in Blender and wanted to bake the details from my high to my low poly within Substance Painter.
But every bake it creates some weird edges (seams or extreme ugly edges); i tried it with a all-smooth lp model and i tried it with sharp edges and UV splits on these edges (so with UV´s for every single smoothing group) and i tried million different settings for my bake in sp - all in all nothing worked to get a clean looking result. Furthermore i read all posts on polycount to this theme and tried it out but nothing happend... 
any ideas?

Here my models:

Low Poly


High Poly


Substance Settings


Issues


Thank you in advance

Anura_Interceptor

You've got some really sharp edges on the high poly baking into 90 degree edges on the low poly it looks like, the angle might just be too extreme for it to bake well. Try giving more exaggerated bevels in the high poly, it might not look right on its own but it works a lot better once you've got it baked. It would also help if you showed some shots of the high and low poly without normal maps, just standard smooth shading so we can see if you've got any shading artifacts causing it.

OVERLORDger

Low Poly with MadCap


High Poly

Okay maybe at the first picture the bevel at the knife blade is little bit hard but the handguard bevel is okay i think but there are baking artifacts too...

Anura_Interceptor

Two other possibilities I can think of are the low poly not matching the high poly closely enough, those seams might be forming because parts of the low poly don't have any high poly geometry underneath them, or the rays travel past the bevel and onto an almost perpendicular surface. If that's the problem, you could solve it by adding a bit more geometry to the low poly, those edges are razor sharp and adding even a simple two-edge bevel could drastically improve both the normal map and the look of the mesh itself without adding many polygons.

Otherwise it might be your UV map, if you've got edges sitting at weird angles you might get a sort of jagged effect where the corners of pixels that just barely touch the UV cause artifacting. I think I might be able to see some of that on the back of the blade.

OVERLORDger

Thank you for your fast response i try to solve the probem with these tips - hope it works

rollin

These topics keep on popping up..
Show your texel density please! 
You are really nit picking here.. I would assume these seams will be practically invisible in the end.
But if you want to make such close up shots of the model you probably need a higher texel resolution

kanga

These kinds of posts go here:Tech Talk
or maybe even here: Substance

OVERLORDger

rollin said:

These topics keep on popping up..
Show your texel density please! 
You are really nit picking here.. I would assume these seams will be practically invisible in the end.
But if you want to make such close up shots of the model you probably need a higher texel resolution

what do you mean with texel density?

rollin

OVERLORDger said:

rollin said:

These topics keep on popping up..
Show your texel density please! 
You are really nit picking here.. I would assume these seams will be practically invisible in the end.
But if you want to make such close up shots of the model you probably need a higher texel resolution

what do you mean with texel density?

What do you mean with what do you mean with texel density?
I mean it exactly as I wrote it: the amount of pixels per surface area.

OVERLORDger

Hope this is what you needed?

rollin

I need nothing from you. But you need to learn something about texel density. 

For the start you could put an unfiltered checker map on the model. It should be possible to see the pixels - a simple checker map should do.
Then post screens of the very same areas you showed in your first post where you drawn this sad sad faces
And you should do this in substance

Posting the uv layout was still useful though.

OVERLORDger

UPDATE: I did some testcases with only a cube and it seems like the ugly seams coming trough, where my UV seams are placed, every other edge was baked perfect - any quick tip how to solve this kind of problem?
And sorry to all advanced "bakers" here, im modeling for about a year but im new to the bake game within Substance

JohannesAg

sounds like you need to set up your smoothing groups then. If you're a bit lost on how baking works I would suggest watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww&t=987s   after that you should be good to go

rollin

You seems to be running in all possible baking issues. At least I hope this will help you understand how things work.
In your cube case I can see some ray misses. You can see where the captured normals information ends. 
This is probably bc of a mix of bake-ray length and bake-ray direction issues. More likely the latter as substance usually normalizes the ray length on your bounding box size. 
However I would advise to test the various options in the bake-dialogue and read the substance manual regarding baking https://docs.substance3d.com/spdoc/baking-109608997.html

teodar23

Whenever i run into baking issues i try to fix them and if nothing works i try baking in other programs to see if the issue is still present. There are loads of bakers out there starting from your used DCC, third party renderers like vray, to more specialised tools like marmo, xnormal, knald, handplane... This might solve your bake but most likely the issue is still there and you might understand where is it coming from. For ex. If you have 2 bakers with similar settings that produce the same broken bakes, and a third baker that has different settings which produces clean bakes, then you know that the problem is one of the bakers options. If you have the same issue no matter the baking tool then its clearly an issue with your model.
Long story short, try different tools and gather more info about the baking process.
https://marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/