I must say this is the best video about this problem. I learned this a long time ago, and for a while it was a pain for me till I understand all the rules, and your explanation is nearly perfect. Nearly, because one thing is missing here. You should add information about straight edges of the UV islands. Sometimes it is possible to make the edge straight, even if the cut is curved. For example. If you have a bevel on the top of the cylinder, you should cut it, and unwrap it as the long stripe. This is the best simple example, to describe what I mean about straight borders of the UV islands. Do not be afraid to make edges straight, even if this will cost a little bit of stretch on your texture, because this can help you to achieve better bake on your edges. Anyway, thank you for all the shared knowledge! You are the best Wes!
Knew for ages that for every hard edge there must be a seam but I didn't know why exactly it gave issues, nice to know more in depth what's going on, Thank you Wes!, this is a great video
I just love how in Blender you have Maya's color scheme for edit mode. Thanks as always, it's an incredibly useful information and definitely a lot of brain cells would be spared trying to figure this issue out.
Thanks for this video Wes! I get this question all the time when teaching 3D Art and you explained it so clearly. I'm covering a baking best practices video in Substance Painter and Blender and will be sure to reference this video.
Great video with great explanation, as always! I was always wondering, what possible issues might be in Unreal Engine, if I won't check the "Compute Tangent space per fragment" option in projects settings?
If enabled, the Bitangents are computed in the fragment (pixel) shader instead of the vertex shader. This parameter impacts how the Normal map is decoded by the Shader in the viewport. Changing this setting will require a rebake of the Normal map.
Would be great with a way of easily mixing Average normal bakes and non average normal bakes in substance, like painting skewing and thats where it applies average normals.
For those who are still confused, follow this mantra: 1. All hard edges must only be seams* 2. All seams can not be all hard edges *Remember to apply padding on your UV islands. Hard edges are usually applied on edges that are going on a 90° angle (sharp corners). Just keep the normal gradients minimal as it can cause issues when mipmapping. This only applies to games.
Hey Wes, I simply baked a cube with chamfers added, the lowpoly is a 6-sided box, the hard edges are cut off, and the UVs are separated, but the AO and curvature maps baked in substance painter are not displayed correctly at the edges of the lowpoly. (The edge of the curvature map should be a pure white to gray gradient, but there are obvious black lines in the middle of the white, and the AO should be pure white, but it shows black lines at the edges) What is the reason, thank you very much😢
@@wes.mcdermott I downloaded a plug-in for this from... was it Art Station, I think? Yeah, I was hoping for an Arnold-esque effect, but didn't get it. Thanks for all you do bro.
hey Wes! could you provide aditional comments on the 'compute tangent space per fragment' option? For instance, is it necessary when my primary engine is Unity?
Thank you Wes! one question, how do I get that fake radius effect (like on the lego brick cylideners in substance). Given the geometry just has one loop (so it's in theory sharp), can we control the size of that "visual radius"? maybe with a filter?
Thanks! In this case, I am using a normal map to fake the radius. I modeled a high res version of the brick that I then baked down to the low resolution version. For the high res version, I just beveled the hard edges and added a few subdivisions.
@@wes.mcdermott alright I see, thank you for the clarification! I wonder if it's possible to simulate the high res radius with a mask using the height/normal channels bypassing therefore the high res model.
Wes, is there a way you can explain more what you mean about the solution. "UV Split and Padding". Ive searched wide and far without anyone explaining what that is. Ive tried everything, and other solutions here on youtube, no explanation. And im using Maya -> Substance painter. might be other command words there than Maya, and that might be throwing me off the scent. Please help, this is driving me crazy. cant get rid of the seams.
in the last, he's saying add UV seams on hard edges where substance saying its missing which is showed by pink edges, just that simple. In your modeling software, just use "select sharp edges" and mark them as seams (if you have such kind of option in maya) or do it manually. but you will have to do UV mapping again.
Hi, I use Maya as well. It's been a while, but in maya preferences you can enable to show soft edges with a dotted line and hard edges as a line. Whenever you have a hard edge, you need to make sure the corresponding UVs are not connected. They need to be split with some padding between the UV shells.
I still don’t get what the implications of this are for our workflow tbh. I get the concept and what’s happening behind the scenes but if we were truly sticking to this concept that every hard edge needs to be a seam for a good bake, then that would mean, unwrapping a simple cube would need 6 different UV-Islands with padding.. That’s incredibly inefficient on texture space since we’re creating so much padding between those. Or am I missing something here?
You have it correct in regard to inefficiency. Hard edges (smoothing split) increases vertex count on the GPU and any UV split does as well. However, they don't add together. If you have a smoothing split, then its 2 vertices. The UV split will not make it 3. So, the workflow in the case of the 6 UV islands would be to use a single smoothing group for the cube and mimize the UV shells as much as possible. However, in this scenario, you would need to make sure the Tangent Basis is synced between the baker and the renderer. This is not much of an issue today. We use MikkTspace in Painter and this is used in UE and Unity as well. In this case, you will get some extreme gradients in the bake, which could cause some compression issues. So, in the end, there is plus and minus to all the techniques. It's good to know what is happening behind the scenes and there is never a single solution.
I must say this is the best video about this problem. I learned this a long time ago, and for a while it was a pain for me till I understand all the rules, and your explanation is nearly perfect. Nearly, because one thing is missing here. You should add information about straight edges of the UV islands. Sometimes it is possible to make the edge straight, even if the cut is curved. For example. If you have a bevel on the top of the cylinder, you should cut it, and unwrap it as the long stripe. This is the best simple example, to describe what I mean about straight borders of the UV islands. Do not be afraid to make edges straight, even if this will cost a little bit of stretch on your texture, because this can help you to achieve better bake on your edges. Anyway, thank you for all the shared knowledge! You are the best Wes!
Thanks much! Great tip on the straight edges. Much appreciated.
Best channel about substance hands down
The aWESome WES!
Thank you so much!
Knew for ages that for every hard edge there must be a seam but I didn't know why exactly it gave issues, nice to know more in depth what's going on, Thank you Wes!, this is a great video
I just love how in Blender you have Maya's color scheme for edit mode.
Thanks as always, it's an incredibly useful information and definitely a lot of brain cells would be spared trying to figure this issue out.
Haha! Thanks! Yeah need to have a little familiar color scheme to get my started in Blender.
Hah! Looking quickly at Blender I thought it was Maya. The color scheme tricked me! hehe
Thanks for this video Wes! I get this question all the time when teaching 3D Art and you explained it so clearly. I'm covering a baking best practices video in Substance Painter and Blender and will be sure to reference this video.
Great to hear! Thanks much!
Thanks! I did fix this issue with smoothing and UVs, but didnt fully understand what fixed it! Glad you cleared this up!
You're welcome!
Thank you for providing two solutions and also covering their pros and cons, most of videos don't do that.
Glad it was helpful! Thank you
THIS VIDEO SAVED MY LIFE
Great video with great explanation, as always!
I was always wondering, what possible issues might be in Unreal Engine, if I won't check the "Compute Tangent space per fragment" option in projects settings?
If enabled, the Bitangents are computed in the fragment (pixel) shader instead of the vertex shader. This parameter impacts how the Normal map is decoded by the Shader in the viewport. Changing this setting will require a rebake of the Normal map.
Would be great with a way of easily mixing Average normal bakes and non average normal bakes in substance, like painting skewing and thats where it applies average normals.
Very Very Much Thanks!!
but i will have to do whole UV mapping again! 🥲🥲
Glad you liked the video : )
For those who are still confused, follow this mantra:
1. All hard edges must only be seams*
2. All seams can not be all hard edges
*Remember to apply padding on your UV islands. Hard edges are usually applied on edges that are going on a 90° angle (sharp corners).
Just keep the normal gradients minimal as it can cause issues when mipmapping. This only applies to games.
Hey Wes, I simply baked a cube with chamfers added, the lowpoly is a 6-sided box, the hard edges are cut off, and the UVs are separated, but the AO and curvature maps baked in substance painter are not displayed correctly at the edges of the lowpoly. (The edge of the curvature map should be a pure white to gray gradient, but there are obvious black lines in the middle of the white, and the AO should be pure white, but it shows black lines at the edges) What is the reason, thank you very much😢
Mr. McDermott.... Did you not come out with some sort of filter or plug-in for creating filletted / softer edges within Painter?
Hi! I did work on a test for this and it wasn't prefect, in all situations so I ended up not releasing it. I was having trouble with concave areas.
@@wes.mcdermott I downloaded a plug-in for this from... was it Art Station, I think? Yeah, I was hoping for an Arnold-esque effect, but didn't get it.
Thanks for all you do bro.
Thank you much : ) Yeah, it was an Ok test but just not very good to release it.
Your videos are so valuable
Thank you!
hey Wes! could you provide aditional comments on the 'compute tangent space per fragment' option? For instance, is it necessary when my primary engine is Unity?
Hi! Unity needs this setting to be Disabled (or enabled if you are using the HDRP workflow).
Thank you very much, Sir!
You are welcome!
Thank you Wes! one question, how do I get that fake radius effect (like on the lego brick cylideners in substance). Given the geometry just has one loop (so it's in theory sharp), can we control the size of that "visual radius"? maybe with a filter?
Thanks! In this case, I am using a normal map to fake the radius. I modeled a high res version of the brick that I then baked down to the low resolution version. For the high res version, I just beveled the hard edges and added a few subdivisions.
@@wes.mcdermott alright I see, thank you for the clarification! I wonder if it's possible to simulate the high res radius with a mask using the height/normal channels bypassing therefore the high res model.
That is a good idea! I was thinking about that as well and I tried blurring the UV edges. It works Ok but I run into issues with concaves.
Hello, it is normal when edges are visible after baking normal map? (close up camera)
Wes, is there a way you can explain more what you mean about the solution. "UV Split and Padding". Ive searched wide and far without anyone explaining what that is. Ive tried everything, and other solutions here on youtube, no explanation. And im using Maya -> Substance painter. might be other command words there than Maya, and that might be throwing me off the scent.
Please help, this is driving me crazy. cant get rid of the seams.
in the last, he's saying add UV seams on hard edges where substance saying its missing which is showed by pink edges, just that simple. In your modeling software, just use "select sharp edges" and mark them as seams (if you have such kind of option in maya) or do it manually.
but you will have to do UV mapping again.
@@druvingame thanx. no idea how to do it in Maya, but thanx for the explanation. ill have a look again thou. 👍
Hi, I use Maya as well. It's been a while, but in maya preferences you can enable to show soft edges with a dotted line and hard edges as a line.
Whenever you have a hard edge, you need to make sure the corresponding UVs are not connected. They need to be split with some padding between the UV shells.
I have this same issue with my UV edges in substance painter. what to do ?
Thanks for tips ❤
You're so welcome!
Great to found u on utube
Thanks!
Hi, is it normal that my sharp edges are still visible even after baking?
Yes, you will still see the geometry. However, what this technique does is remove the shading artifacts.
I still don’t get what the implications of this are for our workflow tbh. I get the concept and what’s happening behind the scenes but if we were truly sticking to this concept that every hard edge needs to be a seam for a good bake, then that would mean, unwrapping a simple cube would need 6 different UV-Islands with padding.. That’s incredibly inefficient on texture space since we’re creating so much padding between those. Or am I missing something here?
You have it correct in regard to inefficiency. Hard edges (smoothing split) increases vertex count on the GPU and any UV split does as well. However, they don't add together. If you have a smoothing split, then its 2 vertices. The UV split will not make it 3.
So, the workflow in the case of the 6 UV islands would be to use a single smoothing group for the cube and mimize the UV shells as much as possible.
However, in this scenario, you would need to make sure the Tangent Basis is synced between the baker and the renderer. This is not much of an issue today. We use MikkTspace in Painter and this is used in UE and Unity as well.
In this case, you will get some extreme gradients in the bake, which could cause some compression issues. So, in the end, there is plus and minus to all the techniques. It's good to know what is happening behind the scenes and there is never a single solution.
NiCe! Thanks
Thanks Brian!
dont need to know how to make the enchilada just give me the enchilada
Please stop with UA-camr Disney voice.. please... Do it for your viewers.
What is he supposed to do? Smoke 6 metric tons of tobacco to get a deeper voice?
Wtf is this comment? Stfu.