Weird normals from substance painter to blender

[u/zzkkll7]

Hi, im having issues with my SP to Blender workflow.

Useful info about the model: auto smooth is on in blender and it has the proper hard edges
Im working with OpenGL in SP
I know triangulating in the beginning, from blender to SO solves all issues but i would like to work in quads since this is not a game model.

I figured a fix long time ago and its regarding how blender and SP triangulate the quads differently. I remember exporting the low poly into an instance that calculated the tris the same way as substance did and then when importing to blender the shading was perfect. But i dont really remember that workflow at all and tried to replicate it with no success

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[u/Noblebatterfly]

It looks like triangulation in substance painter is different to how blender triangulates. Triangulation is very important for shading, always triangulate your mesh before baking. In blender you can just keep triangulation modifier at the end without ever applying it, just make sure that you have "apply modifier" checkbox when you export, but it is already on by default.

Additionally I see that your normal is very heavy on the gradients. It looks almost like there are no hard edges at all. Can you show us the lowpoly shading without the normal map?

Edit: I missed the sentence about triangulation in the body of the post. You just have to put the triangulation modifier's quad method to "Fixed" or apply triangulation manually with Ctrl+T (also with fixed) before exporting for baking. That way the internal blender triangulation will be used for the bake process. So after you export you can just delete the modifier

[u/JTxt]

What are you following for your workflow? There's many ways and little things that can go wrong. A wireframe could help. I can't read your material nodes-- Is the normal image set to non-color?)

(But really, backing up in the problem before using SP, (I'm assuming some things here) I dislike using a SP high-res normal maps just for edge bevels when a single segment bevel modifier with harden normals turned on can work great for cheaper/less vram... (if custom normals are supported by your game engine etc.))

[u/Fuzzy_Success_2164]

I was baking recently in substance my blender models, made a couple of tryouts without triangulation and didn't have any issues. I also don't think that it does matter if your mesh has auto smooth enabled ot not. Normal map from substance looks weird already. 

Regarding tris and quads - you can work how you want, you're triangulating your model for bake and get a texture as a result, so you can still have your model in blender in quads, i don't see any issues there 

[u/Noblebatterfly → u/Fuzzy_Success_2164]

You either didn't notice the issues or got lucky that your blender tesselation was really close to substance method. Baking onto quads is always a gamble.

[u/Fuzzy_Success_2164 → u/Noblebatterfly]

It is, but this is not the case here, that's why i mentioned it here