[Marmoset Toolbag / Substance Painter] Normals look poor in Substance Painter but fine in Marmoset
Hello,
I'm working on a weapon model for my portfolio and have started to import my assets into Substance Painter for texturing, but have encountered a problem. My model is going to be rendered in Marmoset and it looks great there, but when I import my assets for Substance Painter the normals and lighting look really bad.
In Marmoset it looks nice. I'm going to render it here anyways and I'll keep updating my textures and checking how they look in Marmoset, so I don't know how much it really matters. The rest of the parts of the gun look poor in Substance too, but not as bad.
In Substance it looks really odd. I suspect this has something to do with the tangents being computed differently in Substance and in Marmoset, but I'm not going to pretend that I know much else about it. I did some quick looking around and saw that I should enable Substance to compute tangent space per fragment, but it didn't seem to do anything. Are my normal maps in the wrong format? I'm using DirectX in Painter, I don't know what Marmoset defaults their maps to.
So what gives?
Thanks.
EDIT:
Switching to OpenGL helped, but I still have this horrible lighting on that extruded triangle bit towards the back of the model.
Replies
Did you triangulate the mesh before baking normals? Because different softwares can triangulate mesh differently. Before baking it's safer to triangulate first, then bake. This way you will make sure that no matter what software you use, the normals will look consistent.
I did that, but no luck.
Can you post a screenshot of how your mesh looks with openGL turned on (which you said made it look better), and after triangulating and rebaking?
Right now we only have the view you sent above, which probably isn't so relevant for troubleshooting anymore.
^
Post your UVs, baked normal map, and smoothing. If you're still having similar artifacts as above after those mentioned changes, I've a feeling your normal map has gradients that can be resolved with better hard edge/smoothing placement.
Well I've since then got it to work by doing... nothing? I just created a fresh new bake with a new .OBJ file and this time it looks great. I unlocked and reset my edges then exported it for baking, but I thought I did that before as well. Oh well, I'm happy now.
Thanks for the help! 😊
Marmoset is more forgiving with tangents and both have different tangent space calculations which affect the shading. Unless its breaking your texturing, don't care about it as long as it looks right in your target engine. You will always have the best look if you bake directly for your target tangent space, so substance bake would look better in substance but worse in marmoset. (Marmoset bakes clearly better tho so Id stay with that and just ignore the errors) - You can also try other spaces in marmoset settings
Edit: On further inspection it looks like quite a big difference, be careful with the strange stretched triangles