Artifacts after baking Normal map from mesh

[SteveW555]

I'm baking some normals from a high-poly mesh to my low-poly. It's all working as expected but I'm getting some black artifacts, that show up as lines/marks in the normal map. I've checked the geometry and the UVs, and there doesn't seem to be a problem. The raised squiggles are perfectly smooth on the high-poly.
I'm baking at 2048.
Any ideas what could be causing this?

[Wes McDermott]

I'm baking some normals from a high-poly mesh to my low-poly. It's all working as expected but I'm getting some black artifacts, that show up as lines/marks in the normal map. I've checked the geometry and the UVs, and there doesn't seem to be a problem. The raised squiggles are perfectly smooth on the high-poly.
I'm baking at 2048.
Any ideas what could be causing this?

Hello,

By chance, does the low poly have hard edges? It looks like the black areas could be from they ray not sampling. Can you post the low and high meshes?

Cheers,

Wes

[SteveW555]

I'm baking some normals from a high-poly mesh to my low-poly. It's all working as expected but I'm getting some black artifacts, that show up as lines/marks in the normal map. I've checked the geometry and the UVs, and there doesn't seem to be a problem. The raised squiggles are perfectly smooth on the high-poly.
I'm baking at 2048.
Any ideas what could be causing this?

Hello,

By chance, does the low poly have hard edges? It looks like the black areas could be from they ray not sampling. Can you post the low and high meshes?

Cheers,

Wes

Hi Wes

I tried some more tests before posting. I'm beginning to wonder if it's a bug, because no combination produces a clean map:
Tried the following:

Made the low & high meshes in ZBrush
Made the low & high meshes in Cinema 4D
Tried as .fbx  or .obj
Saved all meshes both with & without smoothed normals (Is this what you meant by "hard edges"?)
Any permutation of baking in Substance Designer produces errors
However, doing the baking (of either pair) within Zbrush or C4D, produces a correct normal map! So this kind of suggests the meshes & uvs are OK, and the problem is unique to Substance Designer.

Could you try with the following low&High pair of meshes: (you can see the strange circular artifacts)

Would it be possible for you to post any simple lo/hi mesh pairs that you know produce a correct map, at least this could rule out a problem on my system.

Thanks

Steve

[Cyrille Damez]

I can't reproduce the artifacts on my machine with the mesh you posted and Designer 4.3.1. Which version of Designer are you using ? Can you give us more info about your setup (OS, cpu, gpu) ?

[SteveW555]

Hi Cyrille

Mac Pro 2.8 Ghz Quad Core Xeon, OS 10.8.5, ATI HD 5870
Designer 4.3.1 build 13894 (Indie)


I get identical results with the SSE or GL engines running.

[Cyrille Damez]

I get identical results with the SSE or GL engines running.

That's expected. The engines are only used for rendering the substance graph. The baking is done by another bit of code in Designer which uses a mix of GPU and CPU.

Could you try to increase the "Max Frontal" and "Max Rear" distance when baking (up to 0.1) ? The default setting seems to be a bit low for the meshes you posted.