Others Blender Substaince painter; Problem with baking curvature map.

[Synx]

Hey,

I'm running into a problem while trying to bake a curvature map from a daz G8F figure. It bakes all of the curvature maps fine, except the chest and I just cannot figure out why that one is providing such a weird result. Here is the curvature baking result i get:

Anyone has an idea what could cause this? I think it has something to do with the normals, but I have already checked if they are pointing the right direction in Blender, reseted the vectors of them, smoothed them, and pretty much everything ells I could think about.

Thanks.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

The only thing else that I know tends to mess this kind of thing up is if auto normal is 'enabled' (object data properties tab). Other dumb issues I've run into is somehow the mesh gets duplicated (v key or something) without me noticing (since it perfectly overlaps), or setting sharpness in edit mode.

You say you reset the vectors as well? I know with my workflow, anytime I try to fix this kind of stuff, I have to make sure to get as close to the original model as possible to make sure previous attempted fixes don't get in the way of the current fix I'll be testing. such as, reseting the vectors via blender's calculations may not match the original vectors coming from daz, due to the two programs using different scaling systems. Have you had to restart from scratch yet and run into the same issue? I don't like it but sometimes I do have to start over, run into the same issues, double check if its an importing issue or else try to figure out which step along the way could be the culprit.

 

[Synx]

The only thing else that I know tends to mess this kind of thing up is if auto normal is 'enabled' (object data properties tab). Other dumb issues I've run into is somehow the mesh gets duplicated (v key or something) without me noticing (since it perfectly overlaps), or setting sharpness in edit mode.

You say you reset the vectors as well? I know with my workflow, anytime I try to fix this kind of stuff, I have to make sure to get as close to the original model as possible to make sure previous attempted fixes don't get in the way of the current fix I'll be testing. such as, reseting the vectors via blender's calculations may not match the original vectors coming from daz, due to the two programs using different scaling systems. Have you had to restart from scratch yet and run into the same issue? I don't like it but sometimes I do have to start over, run into the same issues, double check if its an importing issue or else try to figure out which step along the way could be the culprit.

Thanks for the answer, unfortunately it didn't help. I checked if auto smooth normals was enabled in object data properties tab (it wasn't). Mesh isn't overlapping either, it was one of the first things I checked since that's a common cause for this.

I tried it with a completely unmodified base G8F character and having the same issue. Tried it with a much higher polycount one as well, which gives a better result but still has the issue where the chest part has different range of values than the rest of the character.

Anyway I somewhat got the result I wanted by converting a normal map to a bit scuffed curvature map. Not perfect, but at this point I got no idea whats causing it.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

The only thing else I can think of is, if all the individual planes are 'individual' ie duplicate vertices, but I'm guessing that would have shown up as well when checking if the faces got douplicated. Not sure why the torso is getting ousted out, makes it sound like a daz issue. Since that looks like the default shape, are you exporting/importing as an obj, or using something like the daz to blender bridge? I feel like an obj would be less prone to this issue.... but that's pretty much the limit of what I can offer

 

[Synx]

The only thing else I can think of is, if all the individual planes are 'individual' ie duplicate vertices, but I'm guessing that would have shown up as well when checking if the faces got douplicated. Not sure why the torso is getting ousted out, makes it sound like a daz issue. Since that looks like the default shape, are you exporting/importing as an obj, or using something like the daz to blender bridge? I feel like an obj would be less prone to this issue.... but that's pretty much the limit of what I can offer

Yeah, I just selected all and used merge by distance. It didn't remove any vertice so no duplicates or lose objects. For the base figure test I just exported it as on OBJ, still the same problem. It's prob something to do with the daz figure yeah, but no clue how to fix it/

 

[Saki_Sliz]

What technique are you using to try to generate a curvature map?
The only technique I know of is to create a custom shader in Cycle, use the pointyness of the geometry input node, and do math operations to get the look I want, I don't know if the technique works well for baking as a texture or if some changes are needed to get it to bake right, but this is typically what I use when making procedural textures


special note: color management has to be set to Standard, and None to get the emission color to match 1:1 whit its input (color in = color on screen). this technique only uses the general normals, I can't tell if your technique is something more custom/part painted/or created by substance painter that uses something closer to an AO detector, because I like how yours look a lot more, cleaner, simpler.

 

[Synx]

I'm using Eevee in blender so your method doesn't work :/

Thats why i'm using Substaince painter for baking the curvature map. They just got to a Bake curvature map option. No idea how it is done, but overall it works pretty well. Gives roughly the result of enabling cavit's overlay in Blender in the viewport.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I'm using Eevee in blender so your method doesn't work :/

Thats why i'm using Substaince painter for baking the curvature map. They just got to a Bake curvature map option. No idea how it is done, but overall it works pretty well. Gives roughly the result of enabling cavit's overlay in Blender in the viewport.

Tried with

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[DyingStar87]

See, if you are not planning to paint your own textures, Substance Painter is waste of time and space on your hard drive. For baking maps, get Marmoset Toolbag. You can bake all kind of maps with few clicks (Normal, AO, Cavity, Curvature, Convex, Concave, bent normals... aaaand many more). Plus, it comes with very nice an powerful real time rendering engine where you can preview your models.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

See, if you are not planning to paint your own textures, Substance Painter is waste of time and space on your hard drive. For baking maps, get Marmoset Toolbag. You can bake all kind of maps with few clicks (Normal, AO, Cavity, Curvature, Convex, Concave, bent normals... aaaand many more). Plus, it comes with very nice an powerful real time rendering engine where you can preview your models.

Yeah but it's not Blender, what we gonna do?!

 

[DyingStar87]

Yeah but it's not Blender, what we gonna do?!

What do you mean? You can save curvature map and use it in Blender.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

I mean it could be done under 1min in any other software lol

 

[Synx]

See, if you are not planning to paint your own textures, Substance Painter is waste of time and space on your hard drive. For baking maps, get Marmoset Toolbag. You can bake all kind of maps with few clicks (Normal, AO, Cavity, Curvature, Convex, Concave, bent normals... aaaand many more). Plus, it comes with very nice an powerful real time rendering engine where you can preview your models.

So does substance painter. It takes less than a minute to set-up the curvature map baking. They are literately designed to do the same thing, and from quick google search about pro's and con's substance painter pretty much is preferred across the board over marmoset toolbag. Easy to use, ton of tutorials, and both pretty much do the same thing in the end.

Tried with

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?

I haven't, I will see if that gives different results thanks.

 

[Synx]

Tried with

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Well i gave it a try but i'm not getting anything out of it. Haven't used zbrush before and it looks like it has a massive learning curve just for something simple like this.

I got somewhat the result I was looking for by converting a normal map, and I will just stick with that. Not perfect but for now good enough compared to learning a whole new program without even a guarante it will work.

 

[Deleted member 1121028]

Well i gave it a try but i'm not getting anything out of it. Haven't used zbrush before and it looks like it has a massive learning curve just for something simple like this.

I got somewhat the result I was looking for by converting a normal map, and I will just stick with that. Not perfect but for now good enough compared to learning a whole new program without even a guarante it will work.

Zbrush interface if you never used it before. Like yeah, can't blame you. If you want a step by step short tuto tell me, I could try to make this (if I find some time). And to be frank I never ever used curvature map (nor assets in my HDD) - I just now they exist lol. That said as Saki_Sliz wrote I'm surprised you couldn't find a way to bake something similar with Cycles .

 

[Synx]

Zbrush interface if you never used it before. Like yeah, can't blame you. If you want a step by step short tuto tell me, I could try to make this (if I find some time). And to be frank I never ever used curvature map (nor assets in my HDD) - I just now they exist lol. That said as Saki_Sliz wrote I'm surprised you couldn't find a way to bake something similar with Cycles .

No don't bother, the thing I wanted to use it for, works fine with the normal converted curvature map I currently got.

I could bake it in Cycles, using the node set-up he posted and bake to emmision, but it's pretty much the same thing as converting a normal map to curvature in substance painter. Both work of the same thing using normals of the mesh instead to create a approximation of an actual curvature. Not the exact same thing, but good enough if nothing ells works.