substance painter baking logic question

phat3d

hello,  i am experimenting with baking of high polygon mesh details on low polygon meshes and i faced an issue where i dont understand the logic behind. i ve added the files as fbx if you would like to try it yourself. i

1. Why does the result in substance painter look super smooth while it does not in blender or unreal engine?
In blender and unreal engine i see afrtefacts produced by the surface normals of the low polygon mesh.
Why are those visible in unreal engine/blender, but not in substacne painter? 

2.  How can i get rid of  of the surface shading issues ?
i tried sharp edges on the low polygon mesh and it helped to reduce them by 80 %.
How can i achieve the same surface smoothness in unreal as in substance paintet?


Unreal Result:


Substance result ( the quality target i want to achieve ) :


low poly mesh:


High poly mesh:


substance Project Configuration


Substance Baking Options i ve used:


export texture settings:


kind regards

Kanni3d

Triangulate your mesh from your DCC, so that it bakes in painter with the same triangulation, as it will also have the same triangulation when your import into a renderer/engine.

These end cap islands have multiple smoothing groups/hard edges on them, they should only have one hard edge (at the uv seam).



You've got smoothing issues in your low res mesh, which will cause artifacting/extreme gradients in your bakes which acts as compensation. Also recommend splitting these faces and setting another hard edge to minimize the extreme shading in your low res.

phat3d

thsi was very helpfull, thank you sir !

gnoop

I think it's not necessary to make extra splits /hard edges there.    I see those dents are already having some loop inside.    It should be possible to project vertex normals  from perfect cylinder ( before dents)  to the edges of the dents .   It would  move the shading gradients  from the cylinder to  that small poly loop inside the dent .   I bet it would be mostly unnoticeable and you saves on vertex count and UV space.

But it takes a few extra clicks  so more time expensive of course . Although in my experience  splitting along never produce perfect shading anyway  so I do vertex normal projecting in both cases usually. Split or non split

phat3d

actually i thought about projecting cylinder normals on the vertices, but i didnt figure out yet how to. thanks i will try this in the near future.
currently i am using blender.

gnoop

In Max I did it with "Normal theft"  script from scriptspot.    Not sure  maybe  they did something in the soft itself now.

Blender has super cool  perfectly working data transfer modifier  that can do it on the fly .

phat3d

i just tried, the results are awesome.