Perfect Normal Map Baking in Substance Designer 5 without a handmade Averaged Cage

[@scottcourtney8581]

I stumbled onto this while searching for something else, and you hooked me in. This was a superbly done video and well worth my time. Thank you!

[@nickquackenbush]

Thanks Scott, I hope it's useful!

[@masterxeon1001]

excellent information! I m going to have to try this!

[@ant1fact]

OMG THIS IS GOLD. I'm literally dancing around the room and having the stupidest smile for like 5 minutes now

[@gelbuilding]

Brilliant Nick, Great Tut and thanks for the file. Cheers

[@jeroen4388]

very nice tutorial. I just recently used the same technique. I am happy you documented it.

[@HapZungLam]

Amazing. Thanks for the tutorial.

[@alenwesker9552]

Nice job. We just need something like this. Thank you .

[@ArizonaTime182]

Thank you, your video was spot on informative.

[@yans.d.4174]

you're my hero !! thank you sir , this helps a lot , i was so devastated with my horrible bakes...

[@thepolygonpilgrimage]

Fantastic! Thanks for sharing!

[@andrewmajewski1756]

You sir, are a God-send. I think the only other method that comes close to getting near-perfect normal maps is Modo when using the Rounded Edge Shader. The best part of this workflow is that it automates the normal map baking process so that you don't even have to take the time to make skew maps (which is fine for a quick fix, but a bit of a chore if you have LOTS of floating geometry). Thanks for sharing your approach on this.

[@mightymarcos]

Hey man this is brilliant. Great tutorial!

[@JonaMarklund]

Awesome stuff, great quick way of doing this!

[@JonaMarklund]

Absolutely! Have to look into that once I get out of the substance children's play area. Haven't had the time to look into if there are any ways of scripting in SD, whatever the case, I'll definitely work this into my pipeline for personal projects!

[@guillermogalaadmora9217]

This is great, thanks for this tutorial, I will use this in every weapon I model 👏🏽

[@DimiShimi]

Thank you very much! Awesome tutorial!

[@natelaurin6421]

This is awesome! Thank you for the tutorial. I ran into this choice between the two baking options on my past few projects, I'm surprised the fix is relatively simple. I'm looking forward to trying this out with my current project's bakes. If this could somehow be turned into a Painter plug-in I'm willing to bet it'd be pretty pretty successful.

[@harrysanders818]

Thank you so much for sharing this !

[@TheGuardianofAzarath]

Very informative :) I haven't really dug that deep into SD yet, i don't really have any models that i'd try using with it yet, but once i get to that stage, this'll be good to know.

[@azamburru]

Would be possibile to se a wireframe of the low and the high poly used in the tutorial? Again you are amazing

[@azamburru]

Wonderful work and explenation, very celar and you are great and generouse to' share. Thank you so much

[@AndreiGhenoiu]

Really nice tutorial!

[@AlecChalmers]

Great video, thanks for the help.

[@pawpotsRS]

thank you Nick!.

[@shdwalex]

It need to similar action for AO too - works perfect!

[@HanSolocambo]

AO depends on normal, like mostly everything else. So if you bake your normals properly and blend average + non average normals as described here, you just go on baking your AO and they'll look perfect.

[@Jarjarniks]

Thank you so much for sharing! I have a question though. When you mention "non-averaged normals" - are you here specifying that the normals AND UV's have been split for where you want the hard edges to be?

[@Pentazemin]

Thanks a lot Nick, its a great idea! just to help a bit about this, you use a simple blur to get the mask edges blurred, you could try the Blur HQ grayscale, I think it would give a smoother blur into mask, so both normals will combine even better, at least in high res textures as 4096 or higher.

[@eggchicken6504]

ThankU! This video is to be beneficial to me. By the way.. One question for you. what is the red node when i been zoom out a mouse roller ( 'cageless'box inside) For example.. 'bmp'node is puple, 'level'node is green. I cant find.. Plese answer when U see :)

[@astronautintergalactic9401]

Thanks for tutorial , it's really helpful ,.. One question can you make a video to show how to make low and high poly model properly in Maya and , export them properly for baking.. One more question also should low poly be inside the high poly or what if of the part of low poly popping out of high poly mesh ? Thanks in advance. ..

[@veronikaovcinnikova1868]

Thank you so much!

[@1981danielmn]

this is a great method , thanks you so much for posting. What about the same problem you get when you back the AO, and other maps to be used in Substance.....PS I am newbie at game texturing / baking

[@MarcusE23]

Hey Nick, Thanks for the great tutorial. I do have one question in terms of the indentions on the side that you fixed by chamfering the edge. Would the be fixable by changing the Vertex smoothing or do you have to chamfer that edge? Thanks!

[@MarcusE23]

Ahhhhh perfect. THanks for the fast response!

[@Toskyval]

+Nick Quackenbush Can you adjust masks without chamfer? I mean: what if you export the mask from SD (the same mask baked without chamfer) and import that in photoshop, then put a "black rectangle" alias "patch" on uv location of the 3 indentions? Or even better directly inside SD (maybe using the "pencil" strument?) ? Maybe too rogue; but maybe is even more fast if you need a very quick fix. Just brainstorming mixed with curiosity and ignorance: still a total noob with SD because I put my spare time on SP too much :p , oh and sorry for my crappy english.

[@herocraftone5920]

i have a question about UV. Is it sew together. I watched your tutorial it just like uv is not sew together but normal is so so good !!

[@herocraftone5920]

+Nick Quackenbush When I set soften edge. It look so weird. I tried so hard to get like your result but It was really difficult . I tried many way as possible as I can to get perfect baking but I have to learn more. Thank you very for you answer me a question ps . apologized for my English Grammar. RIP

[@alesZoot]

Was wondering... Why not just use one smoothing group for the whole mesh and get rid of the problem?

[@HanSolocambo]

If you use only one smoothing group, especially with hard surface models, your details will always be skewed whether you bake with average normals or not. So you need smoothing groups on the low poly, two bakes, one to define the edges, one to get non skewed high poly details.

[@lluc84]

Great video but I have a question: Why you don't use cage to solve that problem? whats the differences? Thanks

[@Lydok]

From what I understand, cages are the same thing as averaged normals. I had to use extra geo at the edges of my model to prevent floaters and detail geo from my high-poly from getting skewed in the low-poly. This was in 3ds Max but I've heard that importing your cages into Substance Painter will give the same results. It's still averaging the normals based on the cage and will skew your high-poly detail.

[@HanSolocambo]

Cages don't make any difference anymore in Substance or XNormals : forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,1842.msg8368/highlight,bake+cage.html#msg8368 Baking evolved and most 3D Softs slowly follow.

[@Rendered7Useless]

This doesnt seem to work the same with openGL Normal maps. Do you have recommendations for openGL?

[@GreyJkee]

Hi! Can you help me? I have getting same results when i render averaged and non_averaged normals? I saved them with different names but they are absolutely the same.

[@izvarzone]

Have a question. What method is better, this or using skewmesh to bake?

[@HanSolocambo]

I believe this is the best method so far. I just talked (04/19/2017) with a dev at Allegorithmic. They're working on a solution to get clean edges and non skewed details in one baking operation. But for the moment the mnethod described here is the best baking option you can get. And going through Substance Designer seems to be the best : there's a way to do something similar in Painter but as there isn't an "edge detect" equivalent it's a bit of a pain.

[@paul2677]

Hi Nick, thanks for the informative video! Do you happen to know if normal maps baked with this method be synced correctly for UE4??

[@paul2677]

+Nick Quackenbush Ah yeah that's as I thought. Tried this method out last night and it worked real nice, virtually identical result to Xnormal but without the cage! Thanks Nick.

[@YeHang]

讲的太棒了

[@bobdilan3398]

Can someone explain me how to bake maps from models in Substance Designer 2019 + versions?

[@sqobar]

Thank you! Here is substance i made based on this video www.dropbox.com/s/b103eedtkg3qfau/normal_baking.zip?dl=0

[@Zeriel00]

This looks way too technical for me, would it be better to use Quixel ddo instead?

[@Zeriel00]

Nick Quackenbush I also liked the procedural textures that you can change with nodes. I just need to learn how to use nodes first :p Thanks for the help

[@ZacDonald]

Every baker has these issues, Substance is the only thing that has a quick and easy fix that lets you get the best of both worlds, and quickly.

[@mskonicki2001]

You forgot to mention a BIG DETAIL: the 90 degree edges need to have a seam and have padding.

[@maksymmaksym7661]

Hi. Thanks for sharing ur technik. I hv one qestion. When i add edge detect it doesnt work ( I shows just white UV shells without any black area like this joxi.ru/l2ZvOPNu8zKk12 . What it can be ?

[@maksymmaksym7661]

+Nick Quackenbush Thank u for answer It was problem with parameter Absolute of my SVG map

[@maksymmaksym7661]

+Nick Quackenbush Are u always use this technik , or maybe it dosent work somtimes ?

[@Den_Kakdilak]

bake in maya, uv snap shot-photoshop refine edge = profit+ easy for editing!!!

[@HanSolocambo]

Sadly, MikkT tangent basis open source (!!!) code has never been implemented by Autodesk neither in Max nor in Maya. So in terms of compatibility with game engines, Substance remains the best method there is.

[@fall-neckthetallneck2977]

Wow, Substance Designer is very powerful! I've been using blender for about 6 months now and blender can't bake normals on corners anywhere near what Substance Designer can do. O_O