Toolbag 4 baking issues

Neox

Seems like something got messed up on import of lowpoly meshes in toolbag 3. At least that is what I assume.

I have a mesh that i half expected to fail in some areas as its a bit funky and has a few mean angles going on. So I was not overly surprised that issues popped up. But i was surprised that they popped up on a lot more and a lot simpler areas than the parts I assumed it would fail.

I checked if it was the same case for Marmoset Toolbag 3 as some of our artists talked about issues they had.

And indeed, the mesh bakes fine besides the expected issues in Toolbag 3.

TB3 bake

tb3 bake closup

tb bake in unreal

tb4 bake

tb4 bake closeup

tb4 bake in unreal engine

steps to reproduce:1. import three highpoly meshes and one lowpoly mesh2. set up baker, change it to Mikk / xNormal Tangentspace3. bake
i checked all meshes, they are all Mikk / xNormal Tangentspace, i tried switching to marmoset and back as this possibly changed stuff in the past. nothing
But oddly enough, the TB3 bakefile works fine in TB4.
you can download both scenes from here
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1m4OhMZMUFqgtA4pERvNYLx6fp9QV2k2M?usp=sharing

EarthQuake

@Neox it looks like this is some sort of tangent space issue. Can you upload the original FBX files as well?

In the meantime, it looks like changing the tangent space to Max, and then back to Mikk and rebaking resolves it.

Neox

i have uploaded a slightly newer version of the fbx, just a few more verts here and there

i can not reproduce the fix. it almost looks like the fbx has hard edges. but it doesnt. actually maybe its one of the export settings from max, will test what happens when i export from maya.

EarthQuake

@Neox interesting, now switching tangent spaces doesn't seem to resolve it for me either. I'm not sure how to reproduce that fix now, I'll look into it more.

Export settings could be an issue here, I believe we're using a more recent version of the FBX importer in Toolbag 4, so if you're saving tangents/binormals into the file or something like that, it could be the cause. This could be some sort of new loading bug too, but I don't think we've seen this on other meshes yet. Can you tell me if you've hit this before or if it's isolate to this mesh?

Neox

yeah its oddddd

because i also had it "fixed" but wasnt sure anymore if the instance i had open was from toolbag 3 or not, i was also sure it came with switching through all the tangentspaces. but then i tried it again by reloading the scene and it didnt work.

today i spent testbaking all the time in toolbag3 but i will try to get the tb4 testrun going coming from maya asap.

Neox

it is btw fbx 2013, as our clients use this. well most of them do. Epic is using it, so all unreal productions use it.