Baking woes - Please help / Ultimate Weapon Tutorial -related. :(
I have been following Tim Bergholz’ Ultimate Weapon tutorial for the last 2 weeks. After watching the modeling videos I got a nice looking AK-M (floaters in yellow).
I also followed his edge
straightening instructions and got everything all packed up nice and tidy. 
However, when it comes to baking everything goes to hell in Substance Painter. Tim doesn’t use a cage to bake and relies on naming convention which is also what I did. Parameters are the same but I can’t get the normal map to bake properly, pretty much every piece on the AK has some sort of problem ranging from picking up other pieces to looking weird. I guess I should lower the front/back distance but the other issues still remain. This is 4k with 8x8 sampling.
I tried making everything 1 single smoothing group and the result is better but not by much.
The funny thing is that it works perfectly fine for Tim. He includes his high res model and even when some of the thin pieces suffer from overlapping and other errors it flies just fine when it comes to baking. I made sure my high res mesh had as few artifacts as possible, no matter how slight to ensure a smooth bake and still nothing :S
So before I’d bug anybody here I went on and read some of the threads on normal baking. I found one of EarthQuake replies in which he includes a file, “edgetest”. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/499159/edgetest.rar I decided to bake that using the same workflow (exporting from 3dsMax, FBX format with the same options Tim uses, etc) and it works flawlessly. Now I understand baking hard edges surfaces is not entirely straightforward and requires some thinking but I relied on Tim’s videos to split smoothing groups and UVs like he did so I am stumped as to what it could be. I even sent both my high and low res meshes to Maya, deleted all the histories, froze and reset transforms to no avail.
Another thing I didn’t understand: Tim packed by hand in 3dsMax, and some of the shells seem real close to one another yet in Painter he baked with 16 px dilation. I have read the polycount wiki on edge padding and when I see his normal map in Photoshop I wonder why so much if he doesn’t have that much room between shells? Am I missing something obvious here?
Hoping you guys can help me I am including 2 pieces that I think are fairly representative of my problems. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1oss9p7j1w63wwb/AK%20email.rar?dl=0 The UVs are in their original place in 1x4K sheet. But I tried scaling everything up and saw no noticeable improvements.
I am using 3dsMax 2016, fbx export is the one set by Autodesk, version 2014/2015
I have been banging my head against this problem for a while now and I don’t know what to do, so thank you in advance for your help guys. I am also trying to get in touch with Tim to ask him directly over Facebook in case you’re wondering.
Replies
So I don't have the tutorial, but I assume he is using the "match by mesh name" functionality both substance painter and designer have. So make sure in section where is says match you select "by mesh name in the dropdown". and make sure the suffixes are what they are supposed to be ie: _high and _low.
You also have to make sure you have the objects named properly ie: thingamabob_high and thingamabob_low.
Now I noticed the files you linked are separate, with a file for each low/high piece of the weapon. While I think it may be possible for the high poly pieces which you can load multiple different files, it is not for the low. You should export a low poly fbx of the gun with all the different pieces, and then a high poly version with all the pieces.
Substance Painter doesn't have a native way to view the hierarchy of files, but if you have Designer, you can load up these files and make sure they match up and once you have selected all the options mentioned above, it should work fine.