Normal Map Always Bakes Wrong And Gives Bad Shading - HELP

Alander787

Hi, it's me again.

I tried to bake my normal map again, after someone here wrote that I should triangulate the mesh and all the problems will be solved. Well it did help with some areas, the majority of those artifacts still persist and I'm losing my hope that I will ever get the normals right. I'm literally pulling my hair out, because I don't get it, what am I doing wrong?



This is meant to be a normal map with details from my high poly mesh. The shading is totally off and I don't know why. The sharp edges are where they should be, the same applies to seams. I maybe added somewhere too many shard edges, but that doesn't seem to be the problem, because that's just the first picture's issue. I did triangulate my mesh before exporting to Substance painter and there, everything looks alright. But as soon as I import the texture to Blender, it's all messed up. 

I can share more informations or even the .blend file if you want. I'm totally lost. Never have I ever got proper normal map....always some stupid problems.

Obscura

Share an fbx of the highpoly and the lowpoly. I'll take a look.

Obscura

I think the problem might be with tangent space mismatch. I don't know if blender can use Mikk tangent space, but most bakers bakes for that. So if you are going to render the mesh in blender, and it does not support mikk tangent space, you are better baking inside blender. Hopefully it supports its own tangent space...

Alander787

I tried to view it in something different than blender and it looks like this on Sketchfab:



The shading doesn't looks as bad as in Blender, but there are weird lines everywhere. They did bake out from the high poly into the normal map. However this also happens everytime with every normal map I bake....

Obscura

Thats a different error. That is due to 8bit bitdepth. You can bake a 16 bits normal map.

Obscura

Here is the solution to that, but it may introduce dither pattern instead of lines:
https://polycount.com/discussion/148303/of-bit-depths-banding-and-normal-maps#latest
Look at the first post in the thread.

Obscura

But to be clear, a fully textured asset with textured roughness will hide the most of those line issues anyways. Using 8bit normal map on a fully smooth object that is highly reflective will always look bad and this is a downside of 8bit normal maps. You can only represent 256 different values and that is far not enough for continuous shading.

Alander787

Well, I'm relieved, I changed the bit depth in Substance to 16 and it works like a charm. I thought that I did it before, but I guess I didn't. Now there are just minor issues, that I can luckily solve myself.

Thank you man, you saved my day.