Substance Painter - Baking Errors

fadeOne

When I Bake Normals in Maya, which is awfully slow, the result is fine. In Substance Painter "Industry Standard", there seems to be a Bug. At least after reviewing this for a couple of days:

All hard normals on lowpoly, split uvs on hard normals. Baked with average normals in SP and Maya wit hdefault settings.

I reviewed the normal maps: For easier understand I just show the R Channel of the normal map.

With higher resolution bakes, this problem is much less an issue, as the seam is getting less obvious as more pixels the normal map has for the curvature.

Nevertheless, for large scale assets, where just 2-3 pixels cover a bevel and the uvs are not pixel snap , maya does a fine job. SP not.

My conclusion:

Maya extends the outside of the uv island not with the inside value, like SP, but extend with a darker value, which seams to be the value of the normal of the other uv island. Therefore the bake looks as perfect as possible.

SP does extend with the inner value, and it looks like this is the wrong decision and should be fixed. In SP Viewport it's the same.

Or am I missing something.

poopipe

It's done deliberately to reduce mipping artefacts when you are viewing from a distance 
 What you're showing here is the opposite - your texel rate is too low for the screen pixel rate and you're getting filtering artefacts as the GPU scales the texture up. 

I'm not sure what you're viewing the examples in - I would recommend testing them against each other in your target engine to see which actually gives you the best result.  (I'd also suggest messing with the padding/diffusion /antialiasing settings in painter) 

It shouldn't be a surprise that a Maya bake could be higher quality though - it's done in software which means it can apply a much more sophisticated approach than you can apply with a GPU. People use painter's baker because it's fast, convenient and 'good enough', not because it's flawless


In practice though.. pad more (>16px at 2048), pixel snap if you can, use an appropriate texel density for your view distance and if you're getting that close to a bevel use geometry instead

gnoop

Also there is a huge chance  it will look  same  ( like in painter) in actual game engine  with hard edges even more revealing themselves at close distance due to SSAO , indirect illumination techniques ,  contact shadows, ray traced shadows .   normal map compression   and so on .