Hard Edges/Seams Showing when Normal Baking - Substance Painter

ChristheLancer97

Hello,

I have an issue where a bunch of objects from my character have hard seams showing when baking and also on the 2D texture viewer:


I've tried multiple things already, such as clearing all of the seams, clearing hard edges, using one smoothing group and unifying normals etc but to no avail.
Anybody have any idea on how to get these seams to disappear? Thanks in advance.

Eric Chadwick

Software?

ChristheLancer97

Texturing and baking with Substance Painter, modelled with Blender

Eric Chadwick

Ok thanks, moving this from Technical Talk to Adobe Substance.

Kanni3d

Attach your low/high res meshes for us to look at, could be loads of things (all that are likely simple fixes).

ChristheLancer97

Will do, I'll send it you through PM.

Kanni3d

Seems like all of your uv's were over two uv squares, which could cause bakes to miss completely.
The problem areas uv's are all broken up by every individual face, which is obviously not ideal and wrong. This can be solved by globally stitching everything together, but a better alternative is to just re-uv them completely. Regardless of what target this mesh is for (games, film, offline rendering etc), it's good to just have nice and straight UV's.

Lastly, it just helps to have good naming conventions, especially for baking (everything was exploded in your fbx's anyway, but look into Matching by Name baking in substance painter, or marmoset toolbag - saves tons of time and effort).

Taylor Brown

Everything you said above is spot on. Just a note on the faces being broken into micro shells, I've seen this happen numerous times on meshes I've reviewed in Maya that came from Blender. Not all the time, but enough to look into it. From what my peers and I have discovered, it seems to just be a bug possibly in how Blender handles fbx's. The faces are in fact correctly unwrapped but Maya considers them to have seams everywhere.

ChristheLancer97

@Kanni3d
Thanks for looking into it, I was using the UDIM workflow and am using 3 different UV Coordinates for the character. Shouldn't that be fine normally? I've had it work for every other project.

I'm not going to lie, the UV arrangement you saw in that file was fast on my end, I got a bit rushy about it because I lost the initial UVs (which were much cleaner) on ZBrush when I split the subtools, thinking that it would retain the UVs on default. I only found out later there was an option to retain them, which messed things up heavily, but Its part of the learning process I suppose  

So I had to go back into Blender, copy and paste the UVs from the non-sculpted versions and well this happened.

@Taylor Brown 
I've only imported/exported them into Blender and ZBrush but the seams issue happened when I copy/pasted the correct UVs from an older version to my current version of the mesh. Strange findings.

Thanks for the help, I think I may just completely redo the UVs again. Hopefully the seams on every face should disappear this way.