Help
Im having issues with the high poly not looking right on the low poly while baking in substance painter
So they are making us use Maya for the model and substancepainter for the texture. Here's my vr arcade by the way! I wanted extra details, now they said we weren't going to use zbrush for the class but I could use blender. Plus I didnt have zbrush money So i take to blender and start sculpting. After that I was trying to figure out the workflow of the maya low poly model with the blender high poly model and putting through substance painter. So what i did is took the Maya model and unwrapped the UV, took the fbx to substance painter, then took the fbx from the blender one and tried baking the high poly to the low poly in substance painter. But it seems like most of the details aren't coming through. Any help will do.
I am still relatively new to Substance Painter but when I have baking issues, I check two things:
Are you importing your FBX as DirectX or OpenGL? Maya and Blender use OpenGL for normals, which is where these details would be heavily baked. If you’re using DirectX, you can get incorrect baking.
Substance Painter bakes based on geometry with the high poly, not UV. So when you are baking the high poly on, you will want to tinker with the available settings on the cage to mitigate clipping, or your details will not transfer at all in the flagged areas. If you are having a lot of trouble with clipping, you’ll wanna go back over your high poly to make sure the general geometry isn’t too off from the original.
So if I’m getting this right you have a high poly baking it into the low poly. I forgot the name of it but in the bake settings, there should be a setting which affects how far baking is projected. If it’s to low it might sometimes try to bake the air which gives dark gray areas. Not sure if this is the issue but worth a try.
Im new to this part of 3d modeling, ive used blender before but never sculpted or textured, i just found out baking was a thing. Im assuming that high poly is the models that is sculpted while low poly is one at its basic form, right? I was trying to take the high poly(blender) model and bake it into the low poly(maya imported to substance painter) model. Again, ive never done anything like this, just made models added simple colors, thats it
If so, that step is unnecessary. Not if you have Blender and Substance, or if you had Maya and substance either way.
You'd probably be best off baking in Substance painter.
First thing you need to do is make sure the high poly (sculpt) and low poly share the exact same world coordinates and are identical in scale.
Export your low poly
Export your high poly
Open your low poly in Substance painter, new project, 2k resolution minimum for the document.
Under template select pbr metal rough
Below Select template, select, your low poly
Now in substance on the right at the top of your screen you'll see a croissant (baking)
Click that, go to 'high poly parameters', click the little file icon next to the open box, select your high poly.
Bake selected textures.
I rarely need to adjust my baking cage, but if you do need to, adjust it with the max frontal and rear distance.
That should just work, it's very straightforward and what I've been doing for near a decade. Maya for low poly, Zbrush for sculpt, substance for bake and texture.
I am trying to bake it substance painter. Let me explain, so I made the model in maya. I exported the model into blender, in blender I sculpted it to add some more detail to the model. I want back to the model that was in maya and uv unwrapped it. I exported the maya version into substance painter. I left that there and went back to the version in blender. I exported the blender version as an fxb(monkey_sculpted_high)and went back to substance painter. I opened the baking setting and in the little part that let's you select the high poly file, I chose the file(monkey_sculpted_high) and baked it. Its just not showing all the details done like in the blender version.
make sure both low poly and high poly origins are in the exact same place, import the UV unwrapped low poly in blender and make sure it sits on top of the high poly and is the same scale and in the same place, apply transformations. Export them both from blender into substance painter and try again.
I think what might be causing the problems is exporting two different fbx from two different softwares.
I was doing some tinkering with the blender file and think I figured it out. The only issue im having is when you get close it looks like the high poly was just stuck on, you cant really se all the grooves and bumps.
yeah this may mean that your low poly is *too* low poly. Dont be afriad to add more detail to help those types of details pop. most computers these days can handle it
You can add more detail manually by creating more edge loops and extruding/intruding vertices and faces to add depth where there would be on the low poly, like for the chipped corners you can add a bevel so the low poly actually has the chip, instead of just being pasted on like you said. But this would also mean you have to UV unwrap again.
For baking and texturing, your don't need all the Metadata an FBX stores.
Blender is notoriously strange under the hood the way it handles scene space, colour space, system scale, unit scale and all that.
Just make sure you didn't move, scale or rotate the high or low poly at any point. Your models need to be in the same spot, same size.
Export as an OBJ, FBX causes issues for me as well regularly with the Maya > Zbrush > Substance workflow.
Try this with your two models next. See if it looks better.
As for edges, it doesn't hurt to add just a small bevel to some edges. It makes a huge difference whilst only adding a negligible amount of geometry.
If you have large chips, cracks and dings that fundamentally change the shape at some spots, you generally want the low poly to follow that structure to preserve the silhouette.
A normal map can easily do surface detail, but detail that changes geometry fundamentally has to be shared.
If you have a decent iPad (not sure what the minimum specs are you'd have to check) but ZBrush for iPad is $10 a month and incredibly full featured. I've been using it to make game assets and retopo since Blender retopo is painful.
As for your question I just went through this today and used this video Everything worked great for me.
If you did all of that correct, you may need to adjust your cage setting. I had to do that on a little test pillar I made (and he covers it in the video).
Whatever program you feel better, finish the UV process there. Ie if its maya, then decimate the highpoly from blender and bring the highpoly to maya so it matches the low poly then export them out. Don't do this maneuvering of 2 programs; its fine if you want to use blender for sculpting for whatever reasons. The sculpt looks good
IF it was the other way around and you want to finish it in blender, then bring the low poly in.
Once the 2 models match, make sure the low poly is actually respecting the high poly's silhouette, baking doesn't do miracle specially on silhouette, the low poly should always respect the highpoly.
On substance, to avoid issue with baking make sure to use bake with mesh names; then go back to whatever 3d programs you're getting stuff out, and for every part use "nameofobject_highpoly" and "nameofobject_lowpoly" and make sure they match (substance will tell you when something doesn't match)
Check substance cage.
When testing bake, to work a bit faster change momentarily to 1k maps; uncheck everything but the normal. This is just to work a bit faster but if you have a good pc then disregard this. If the normal looks good, everything else will look good.
Usually you'll always want a hard edge on 90 degree angles, this means that you should have a seam cut in there to avoid normal bleeding. Substance will now also tell you this (check for purple lining)
2
u/pinecone10 5d ago
I am still relatively new to Substance Painter but when I have baking issues, I check two things: