Low-poly model which is fine in Blender and ZBrush covered with artifacts when opened in Painter

[Andrew299466316exf]

Hi.

I'm working on a model of a floppy disk. I finished the low-poly version and it looks great in Blender and also if I export it into ZBrush, both in the viewports and if I render it.

However, as soon as I open the .fbx in Substance Painter, there are artifacts all over the model. This isn't a baking issue, as they're there prior to baking - as soon as the model is imported. I baked it anyway, just to see what would happen, and although this masks the problem in a few of the areas, it's still clearly apparent in others.

What have I done wrong here? All normals are facing the right way, and I've used MERGE BY DISTANCE to check there are no double vertices.

I've attached screenshots which will hopefully make the issue clear. I'm still relatively new to 3D so please bear with me if it's just that I'm doing something daft.

Thanks in advance.

-Andrew

[Andrew299466316exf]

Oh, here's the low poly .fbx too, for anyone willing to take a look. I should've attached that in the first place.

Cheers

-Andrew

[davescm · Accepted solution]

Hi

Importing your fbx model into Blender did show those same artifacts that you saw importing it to Painter.

It looks like you have exported some smoothed normals which are not working well with the triangles in your mesh. I also got some strange effects when I set the faces to flat instead of smooth and was able to remove that from quads with Mesh normals - Average - Face Area, again confirming what I saw before.

I would revisit the model and try and eliminate the triangles. Then re-export.

Dave

[Andrew299466316exf]

Thank you! I really appreciate you taking a look at it for me.

I seem to have managed to work out (kind of) where it went wrong this evening: it seems that the file was fine as it was exported from Blender. After modifying it in ZBrush and exporting it from there, this is where the problems started. From what you've said, I guess I should look at the .fbx export options from ZBrush to see if I had something to do with normals selected which I shouldn't have.

It's strange because Blender to ZB to Substance Painter has been the way I've generally been working for a few months now, and I've not had this issue before.

Many thanks.

-Andrew