Lowpoly Retopo und Baking in Substance Painter

JuniWonderland · Nov 2020

Baking is one of my biggest problems; I still struggle with it.
I am doing a hardsurface 'character' for the first time and I sculpted the Highpoly in ZBrush and made the retopo in 3DsMax
The edges in my normal and ao are not very clean and I feel like that is not the bake, but hte lowpoly?
I am baking in Substance Painter (I also tried Marmoset) in 8k, cause the texture sets in the end will have 4K.
The things I tried were: different frontal distance in substance painter, I reset the normals in 3Ds max I added more room between the UV shells.
But maybe its just that my highpoly is not clean enough and is now clashing with the lowpoly?

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/9q/eb00ojtsbf5v.jpg

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/9c/ju2qu89w2187.jpg

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/7m/atu2l08o13d6.jpg

That was before my attempts at fixing it...its not that bad anymore

herer you can see the wireframe and its worse were the lowpoly isn't following the highpoly exactly, so do I need more Polys in my lowpoly?

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/mh/u9bvkph2u5by.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/au/91mh9dtxd67k.png

gnoop · Nov 2020

More hi poly your low poly is better it looks indeed but you have to keep in mind that you need your bake to look good on lods too. I often bake for lod02 initially. The way switching from lod01 doesn't cause sudden shading blinks. So more geometry is not an option usually.

Also keep in mind that baking over hard/split edges while looking perfectly well in Substance , 3d max or Blender or even in U4 itself might be not that perfect in actual game. I am not working with Unreal but did saw how it reveals hard edges once its screen space AO is applied to a scene or after static illumination baking. In our engine the hard edges never look same perfectly rounded as in package you bake them , my guess compression and shadow maps maybe .

So IMO those normal map shading is never 100% perfect and you just cope with the fact . Sometimes cage tweaking and doing support loops next to hard edge for baking only helps. I often bake object space normal map as exr initially , and then quickly re-bake into tangent space to whatever vertex normals or support loops tweaks I may do later

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Lowpoly Retopo und Baking in Substance Painter

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