Multiple UV Tile Normal Map seams on Character Model Substance Painter textures

rgadiy · Jul 2020

I recently sculpted a character model from scratch in Mudbox, built the low-poly version by Quad Draw in Maya, unwrapped and cut the UV's into mirrored shells over multiple UV tiles, Baked the Normal maps from the sculpt through HandPlane, fully textured the model in Substance Painter, and brought those textures back into Maya.

Substance Painter does not support painting across UV tiles yet, so of course I have seams to cleanup, but I can't figure out how to get rid of them. The original baked normal map appears fine, but the Substance normal maps I painted on all have UV seams between tiles. I can't paint the seams out in Mudbox either. The flat normal map color will cover it, but if I try to use the clone stamp tool there is still a UV seam, so I'm wondering if the normals are somehow flipped at the edges only?

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/3j/fmcbx4cysxe6.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/xu/7sgehhymkg4g.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/1c/i6rhvmwr787f.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/ct/xs3qb6fbvgxq.jpg

rgadiy · Jul 2020

Finally figured things out, I didn't expect that mirroring and stacking UVs would also require inverting the orientation of the normal maps with a second shader node of each UV tile for the shells on one side with the use of aiNormalMap, I had just been using the bump2d node.

Multiple UV Tile Normal Map seams on Character Model Substance Painter textures

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