Black Edges in Normal Maps? Here’s How to Fix Them with Substance Painter and Blender 

Thanks much! Great tip on the straight edges. Much appreciated.

The aWESome WES!

Thank you so much!

Haha! Thanks! Yeah need to have a little familiar color scheme to get my started in Blender.

Great to hear! Thanks much!

Glad it was helpful! Thank you

You're welcome!

Glad you liked the video : )

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.

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.

Yes, you will still see the geometry. However, what this technique does is remove the shading artifacts.

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.

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.

Thank you!

You are welcome!

Thanks!

Hi! Unity needs this setting to be Disabled (or enabled if you are using the HDRP workflow).

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.

You're so welcome!

Thanks Brian!

What is he supposed to do? Smoke 6 metric tons of tobacco to get a deeper voice?