Lowpoly Retopo und Baking in Substance Painter

JuniWonderland

Baking is one of my biggest problems; I still struggle with it.
I am doing a hardsurface 'character' for the first time and I sculpted the Highpoly in ZBrush and made the retopo in 3DsMax
The edges in my normal and ao are not very clean and I feel like that is not the bake, but hte lowpoly?
I am baking in Substance Painter (I also tried Marmoset) in 8k, cause the texture sets in the end will have 4K.
The things I tried were: different frontal distance in substance painter, I reset the normals in 3Ds max I added more room between the UV shells.
But maybe its just that my highpoly is not clean enough and is now clashing with the lowpoly?


That was before my attempts at fixing it...its not that bad anymore

herer you can see the wireframe and its worse were the lowpoly isn't following the highpoly exactly, so do I need more Polys in my lowpoly?

gnoop

More hi poly your low poly is better it looks indeed   but you have to keep in mind that  you need your bake to look good on lods too.  I  often bake for lod02 initially.   The way switching  from lod01 doesn't cause sudden  shading blinks.      So more geometry is not an option usually.

Also keep in mind that baking over hard/split edges  while looking perfectly well in Substance , 3d max or Blender  or even in U4 itself  might be not that perfect in actual game.     I am not working  with Unreal  but did saw  how  it reveals hard edges once  its screen space AO is applied to a scene or  after static illumination baking.      In our engine the hard edges  never look same perfectly rounded  as in package you bake them , my guess compression and shadow maps maybe .

So IMO  those normal map shading is never 100% perfect and you just cope with the fact .   Sometimes cage tweaking  and  doing support loops next to hard edge  for baking  only    helps.    I often bake object space normal map as exr initially ,  and then  quickly  re-bake into tangent space   to whatever vertex normals or support loops tweaks I may do later

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