Substance 3D Painter Baking Parameters
Description
In this guide, we will take a look at the settings in the baking window, Common Parameters section.
(This tutorial was created and tested with Substance Painter 2017.3)
Computing the Ray Distance
Baking the normal relies on shooting rays. The rays are shot from frontal distance setting or from a cage mesh. The larger the difference between your high and low res mesh, the larger the distance will need to be. The total distance the ray travels is defined by the Frontal and Rear Distance. If the ray distance is too long, then it may hit neighboring geometry.
Frontal Distance
The Frontal Distance setting allows you to create a virtual envelope from where the rays are shot from. Starting from the low res mesh, the distance is computed based on the setting and the direction given by the averaged normal. With hard edges and Average Normals enabled, the envelope is continuous as shown in** figure 01**. The baker will compute the averaged normal between the split vertex normal when the low res mesh has a hard edge.
Rear Distance
The Rear Distance is where the ray will stop.
Cage Mesh
Use Cage allows you to replace the distance setting with a cage mesh from where the rays are shot.
Relative to Bounding Box
BBox Relative is a distance scale. When checked, distances are normalized in the 0-1 range. Distances are expressed as a percentage of the Bounding Box size. When not checked, the distances are not normalized and dependent on the object size.
Average Normals
With Averaged Normals disabled as shown in** figure 02**, the mesh normal is used. If the mesh has hard edges, this can result in missing information or gaps in the calculation. With Average Normals off, the rays are parallel to the mesh normals. If Average Normals is off and the mesh has smoothed normals, then there will not be gaps in the calculation.
Match by Mesh Name
Using Match by Name can resolve projection issues with neighboring geometry by comparing rays with geometry of the same name followed by the _low and _high suffix defined in the Preferences. In figure 03 , you can see how the high and low res meshes have matching names for the mesh parts.
The high res mesh can be divided into multiple files (fbx, obj) where the model file name matches the low res mesh part as shown in figure 04.
Ignore Backface
When Ignore Backface is checked, the rays will stop if they hit the backface of a triangle.
