Is Substance Painter's normals synced with Marmoset Toolbag ?

[mashru21]

I am mainly concerned about mikktspace.

I have a simple mesh in high and low, exported in obj to avoid exporting tangent & binormals
mesh is also triangulated to avoid tringulation mismatch errors.

bakes out of painter does not look accurate in toolbag.



you can get test files here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gl0c9jmagxVL6BXsQBxDmG-Q6a-E3K_j

please help, what am I doing wrong ?

[victaa29]

Hey, you can try and harden all your UV borders.



Here is the bake viewed in Marmoset, the green version is baked directly in Marmoset, the bottom is baked in Painter exported to Marmo

[Jeremie Noguer]

Make sure your Painter project has the option "Compute Tangent Space per Fragment" checked in the Project Configuration and bake again. That should fix it.

[mashru21]

thanks for the replies.

@ Victor - harden all UV border is a very out dated method that pretty much defeats the purpose of synced normal maps. it also introduces quite visible seams along all the UV borders / hard edges besides other issues. i think i can even see some of those seams on your screenshots.

@ Jeremie - i tried that already, but it gives different shading errors:

compute tangent space per fragment ON

[victaa29]

If you break the UV on each 90 degree and harden that edge you wont get any seams with enough padding.  I didn't go through the entire model on the screenshots I posted.

Is this out of date practice though? I'd also like to know if it is, I tried this 'sync'ed workflow using 1 smoothing group years ago when everything was supposed to be synced up and never got good results for hardsurface bakes going from Painter into Marmo, I think I even did a post about it quite some time ago. 

For production we opted to just do the typical break UV island and harden edge at 90 degrees and we got seamless bakes all the way into game engine (Unity).  We also ran into the issue with compression, when you make the entire model completely smooth the normal map is working twice as hard to correct the smooth areas resulting in some banding and gnarly stuff happening in game.  But I am a bit old school in my ways now

[victaa29]

I feel like an idiot for jumping the gun.  You are correct you don't need to break the UV islands etc. 

I threw in the Substance Painter normal map bake with your meshes into Unity and low and behold it shades beautifully! (Turns out my old methods were with Unity 5..)

[mashru21]

thanks for the clarification.

so unitiy looks to have a more synced tangent space with substance painter resulting in such clean normals.

i am just wondering what i am doing wrong that i cant seem to get that perfect bake look in marmoset toolbag.

is toolbag mikkt different from substance painter mikkt calculation ?

[victaa29]

Funny thing is, the Marmoset version baked in Mikkt space doesnt work when I place it in Unity (gives those nasty shading errors).

I've started a post at Polycount in the Marmoset section, I am sure its something simple we're overlooking.

https://polycount.com/discussion/214085/confused-about-tangent-spaces-marmo-sp-unity/p1?new=1

[mashru21]

Funny thing is, the Marmoset version baked in Mikkt space doesnt work when I place it in Unity (gives those nasty shading errors).

I've started a post at Polycount in the Marmoset section, I am sure its something simple we're overlooking.

https://polycount.com/discussion/214085/confused-about-tangent-spaces-marmo-sp-unity/p1?new=1

that would actually make sense since Painter bake looks off in Marmoset.

so if we are not doing anything wrong while baking in Painter, then the question remains is who is doing the proper mikkt bake ? painter or marmoset ?

if unity renders painter bake properly then at least Painter and Unity are doing something similar.

is Marmoset doing something wrong ? or both Unity and Painter doing something wrong ?

I just would like some answers whether we are doing anything wrong in Painter or not.