Correct Workflow between Blender and Substance Painter for baking good normal maps? I'm having seams

G0056

I've seen a lot of posts, videos...related to normal maps, shading...But I'm still having some issues when baking my normal maps, so I did some tests, and I wanted to show you to ask if I'm missing a part or doing something wrong:

First, I used a simple default cube to try. I marked all the edges sharp and as seams, activated auto-smooth(angle 180º) and then I shaded smooth and UV unwraped. Then I created another cube, beveled a bit all the edges and added some sculped details on the faces, just to try different things.


Then exported both in fbx format, and created a new project on substance painter(default settings, just changed normal map format from DirectX to OpenGL. I baked the mesh maps using default settings, just changed the resolution to 2048 and added subsampling 2x2(Usually I bake by mesh names, but because this is just a try using just a cube, I left that option in always)


The sculpted details on the faces are looking good, buy I'm having this seams on all the edges, and I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or missing something, so the people that uses Blender could give me some help, please?

Obscura

The visible seams in the normalmap view is an expected behavior. Its a tangent space normal map meaning that the uv rotation changes how different directions relative to the rotation are "colored" in the normal map.

Try adding dilation to the bakes.

G0056

Obscura said:

The visible seams in the normalmap view is an expected behavior. Its a tangent space normal map meaning that the uv rotation changes how different directions relative to the rotation are "colored" in the normal map.

Try adding dilation to the bakes.

Gawd, it looks a lot better now, thanks you!! I thing I'll have to research a lot more xD I never saw anything about that dilation option. Default dilation was 1, I put 8 when doing this new bake and the result is great. 

Obscura

Pixels are square by default. And they are interpolated to make them appear smooth. Now imagine laying your uvmap on the square pixels. If you don't pixel snap the border of the uv islands, they will hang over to empty pixels. Dilation expands the uv borders and fill the neighbouring pixels with with the original color. Unless you have some specific reason not to, you should use large dilation all the time. This is recommended because there is also a thing called mip mapping which reduces the texture resolution based on distance and/or viewing angle. With reduced resolution, the overhanging to empty neightbouring pixels will result in even more visible seams. So its the best idea to max out the dilation setting.