Baked Bevels Workflow in Blender & Substance Painter

Sorry for the dog barks, that wont repeat again. Cheers!

[@manollobango]

Did you kill the dog now or how do you want to prevent him barking? 😅

@@manollobango I like dogs, wont kill them. Unless they kill mine ala John Wick. Now I just record at night when everyone is asleep.

[@mozzarellaarc]

Keep up the good work man !!! love your contents !!!

True, I mispelled that, sorry!

[@michaels6137]

Very much appreciate the clarity of the subject. I was just trying to figure out if I should retopologize first, bake, and then import to Substance. Thank you.

[@Bodni]

Just a Suggestion, if you have a hard edge on the mesh, you need to separate it on the uv. Thatswhy you have that strange-looking thin lines on some places. The mesh's tangent normal is breaking along the hard edge, and the limitation of the texture pixels vs the precise edge vector causing these artifact. It tries to draw between pixels. a littlebit from the one side and a littlebit frome the other. If you separate it, you give it a room for edge bleeding. ( I hope it's understandable, sorry for my english :D )

[@t.theonian24]

That is not the reason. I have the same problem, and have never found a solution. SP material generators always give dark or light seams on hard edges with bevels. If you smooth shade the lowpoly, you get smooth bevels without lines, but the shading becomes completely broken over the flat surfaces... Seems you can't win. Taking the albedo from the smooth shaded bake and using it on the hard shaded lowpoly with the normal from the hard shaded bake helps, but it's an annoying process and the bevels are still not quite perfect.

[@Avarice_]

It definately makes it better but there is still a tiny line there

[@Bodni]

@@Avarice_ is there padding on the texture? if not, or slim, try to make a thicker one. if the problem still exist, try to separate the uv islands with a bit more distance.

[@ThatFalseHat]

Wow so much information and tips compacted into one video! Nice.

[@kruth6663]

Thank you for making these videos!

[@RTX-zo2yc]

nice video,,,,keep it up,,and when i use substance painter ,,,i get tiley type smart materials in mesh,,do you have any idea?

[@lz4090]

Nice. Do we need to do this prep in blender before going to substance for 2020? Thank you

depends on the project, but its highly encouraged if you're baking normals in Blender and using them in substance after

[@lopoisaac]

Thanks for sharing! I learn a lot from your videos :)

[@dirge8032]

Do you ever get issues with world space normals and seams going from blender to substance painter? my models always seem to come with harsh seams that triplanar blending does not help. it al seams to start when i bake the world space normals map. i have tried in blender and substance painter with multiple settings and cant figure it out.

I'd need to see the file to understand better, but some clues can be related to the texture resolution and how you need to set it to OpenGL

[@dirge8032]

@ Thanks for the reply. I have created a test piece and linked it here if you would like to take a look. there is a png showing a faulty/discontinuous bake in substance painter as well as a blend and FBX file. I have been struggling with this for days now and have tried various methods of making the model bake correctly. edge slip modifier, normal smoothing, beveling openGL and direct x and I have re-done the IV layout multiples times. I have read around that has a lot to do with smoothing groups and edge sharpness but I can't figure out what i need to change since my model has no sharp edges, just UV seams which is where the issue always shows up. I'm sure it is something simple but for the life of me, I can't figure it out. any time you have to spare to look at this would be much appreciated. I should also note that the mesh test piece is unwrapped correctly as it is part of a much bigger mesh. drive.google.com/open?id=1qZbKXswflkGUj93Uy32ss8xZlh5rA1d_

[@gower1973]

Thx for that edge split tip, for tangent space baking, I never really got might head around baking a good normal map, always end up with a mess, gonna check out your other videos, been using blender for a couple of years and substance for about six months, do you ever bake an ID map in Blender to take to substance, that’s the way I do it, I find the substance one doesn’t always work

About ID maps, it all comes down to your Studio/ pipeline. In that particular piece I manually masked everything in SP. I found that baking ID maps with no planning will just higher the friction of the workflow.

[@billcritchomatic9983]

I enjoyed this video. I have been trying to use Blender for normal baking but struggle with quality issues. Do you think it is helpful to work in 16 bit? Seems many feel its crucial to bake at higher bits. Most of the time I use the bevel modifier with High/Low poly setup, seams on all bevel edges (CGcookie method). This way the only difference between High and low is just the modifier and the smoothing angle. This gives you a little control of bevel width variation. Wish Blender had proper AA in the baker. I will give your workflow a try, thanks for sharing.

Indeed, as of today Im manually removing dithering artifacts with Photoshop, specialy when dealing with hero props. I found out that even by baking with a 32 bit float and then reducing it back in PS in sRGB gives me some extra bit depth but stalls my workflow time. If you are adopting this in production, make sure its consistent over all assets in unity.

[@gutorpg]

Great content !

[@manollobango]

The hotkey for applying all modifiers in 2.8 isn't set by default. You have to either set the hotkey manually or change the keyboard layout from standard to 2.7x within the preferences

[@globglob3d]

Thanks a lot for this video! Been struggling with finding the right workflow for hard surface normal baking in Blender and this helped so much! Could you explain quickly how you do your smooth shading before baking though? Do you just smooth shade and use autosmooth with a set angle or do you do everything with the edge split modifier (marking sharp edges as needed)?

I find the results from auto smooth to not be reliable when you want to export your mesh to different applications. So I manually mark sharp edges.

[@laurynaskeleras]

Does anyone else have issues with Edge Split modifier? It does nothing for the bake, unless I apply it... Which kind of adds one additional step of needing to merge splited smoothing groups after bake is complete.

Hi Laurynas, thats why in the video I duplicate the mesh before applying the edge split, that way you have the original saved, and the other only serves for the purpose of baking. Best Regards :)

[@laurynaskeleras]

@ Makes perfect sense :D Thanks for your reply and keep up the good work!

[@austin5321]

i hear a woofer

It's my neighbors dog that got angry with a Truck crashing near by :(