How do I prevent this baking error?

[Katie M Hall]

Hey!

I often have this issue when baking normal maps in Substance Painter. I'm not sure how to describe it, but it's the green stuff seen here:

 

It makes the model look "shiny" when coloured:

I thought that splitting the object into more meshes would help,

...but unfortunately, the problem persists.

Here's what my baking settings look like:

What can I do to fix this? I've attached both the high and low poly models to this post!

[Cyril Dellenbach · Accepted solution]

Hi Katie,

Thanks for the question.

The issue comes from the Normals of the mesh, which is heavily related to the topology. I advise you tou to build everything in Quad and to keep a logical flow in your topology. 

Also, no need to separate the parts. Here is your low poly mesh with the normals revisited a little bit.

Best regards,

[Katie M Hall]

I work with quads, but in this post I made earlier this year (I have two Adobe accounts with the same username and password?) I was told that I shoud triangulate my mesh before exporting it from Maya to prevent texture warping.

Is it best to export the triangulated mesh out of Substance Painter instead?

[Cyril Dellenbach]

This is an interesting topic.

My advice here is to make sure you work in a quad workflow (which is the most common), because it will usually ends up with less issues.

But you're right, Substance 3D Painter, as many software, will triangulate your mesh anyway in the backroom, and when applying the textures made on a triangle mesh back to a quad mesh, you can end up with warped textures. So no problems with your current workflow, but there are issues with the flow of the topology, causing artifacts in the Normals.

When you bake your maps in Substance Painter, the Normal map will try to compensate these artifacts, resulting with the issue mentioned in the first message.

Make sure to add edge loops at the border of sharp edges, avoid Ngon/triangles when building the mesh and keep everything clean in order to avoid these kind of artifacts.

Best regards,