Weird shading issue between Substance Painter and Blender, no idea how to fix

pixelslayerr

Hello, I've been working on this game-res guitar model for the last month or so and I've noticed that some issues seem to pop up when exporting my texture maps from Substance to Blender.

As you can see here, the shading on the model appears fine inside of Substance. The normal map from my high-poly bake seems to be doing its job and everything is smoothed out.


However, here it is inside of Blender (EEVEE). Despite the normal map being plugged in, it doesn't appear to be doing much. It is adding details that I added in Substance, such as the diamond texture pattern on the knobs, but it doesn't seem to be smoothing everything out. From what I can tell it seems like the normal map is overriding the face shading in Substance but in Blender, it's just being overlayed on top, or something.

For starters, I've made sure to export my normals as OpenGL to use in Blender, and I've exported the normal map at 16-bit depth just to ensure there'd be no artifacts. The node in Blender is also using "Non-Color" color space. 

Any help is very much appreciated. Thank you!

Fabi_G

Hi! Did you triangulate the mesh to make sure its shading is consistent between Blender and Painter?

okidoki

Thanks for the modeling challenge all quads, subdiv level 2, the small holes are ugly but will be concealed by the screws (so maybe even not needed at all ? ) 

pixelslayerr

Fabi_G said:

Hi! Did you triangulate the mesh to make sure its shading is consistent between Blender and Painter?

Hello! Sorry for the late-ish reply. I figured out my issue for the most part. What I ended up doing was using the Weighted Normals modifier in Blender, which seemed to fix all the problem pieces with enough tweaking. The shading issues didn't make themselves apparent unless I used a shiny matcap to preview it before exporting to SP, so that also helped. 

i didn't triangulate my mesh before exporting, but i did notice that a few tris in certain areas of my model would just not be shaded correctly in Blender, so i temporarily left them as N-gons before exporting to let Substance triangulate them. Exporting the triangulated mesh from Substance and applying the exported textures seemed to work, and now the model in Cycles looks pretty much identical to I-ray--i just find it so weird that my normals looked completely fine in I-ray until I exported them to Blender, very weird.

In the future I'll definitely be sure to triangulate everything before I export, since that seems to be the most surefire way of avoiding weird shading incongruencies from what i've read on other forums.

Fabi_G

Nice that you solved the issue
I like to use the Triangulate Modifier on top of the stack, since it's non destructive and the shading can be previewed.