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Bent Normals from Mesh | Substance 3D bakers

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  2. Home
  3. Getting Started
    1. What is Baking?
    2. Software interface
      1. Substance 3D Painter
      2. Substance 3D Designer
      3. Substance 3D Automation Toolkit
    3. Availability per software
    4. Compatible 3D software
    5. Tutorials
  4. Bakers settings
    1. Common Parameters
    2. Ambient Occlusion
    3. Ambient Occlusion from Mesh
    4. Bent Normals from Mesh
    5. Color Map from Mesh
    6. Convert UV to SVG
    7. Curvature
    8. Curvature from Mesh
    9. Curvature from Mesh (deprecated)
    10. Height Map from Mesh
    11. Normal Map from Mesh
    12. Opacity Mask from Mesh
    13. Position
    14. Position map from Mesh
    15. Thickness Map from Mesh
    16. Transferred Texture from Mesh
    17. World Space Direction
    18. World Space Normals
  5. Guides
    1. Error and Warning Messages
    2. Performances and optimizations
    3. Triangulating before baking
  6. Features
    1. Geometry Cache
    2. GPU Raytracing
    3. Matching by Name
    4. Tangent Space
  7. Common questions
    1. How to export the baked maps?
    2. Is dithering applied to baked textures?
    3. Should I enable "Compute tangent space per fragment"?
    4. What are Assbin files?
    5. What is the bit depth of baked textures?
    6. What is the difference between the OpenGL and DirectX normal format?
    7. Why are there strange stretches in my textures after baking or exporting?
    8. Why is Matching by Name not working with Ambient Occlusion/Thickness?
    9. Why is my mesh fully black after baking?
  8. Common issues
    1. Aliasing on UV Seams
    2. Baker output is fully black or empty
    3. Baking failed with Color Map from Mesh
    4. Black shading cross are visible on the mesh surface
    5. Mesh parts bleed between each other
    6. Normal map has strange colorful gradients
    7. Normal texture looks faceted
    8. Seams are visible after baking a normal texture
    9. Seam visible on every face
    10. Texture baked outside of Substance software looks incorrect

Bent Normals from Mesh

The Bent Normals from mesh baker computes a texture that describes the average direction of ambient lighting. This baker is derived from the Ambient Occlusion from Mesh baker.


Available in:

  • Painter
  • Designer
  • Automation Toolkit

Parameters

ParameterDescription
Secondary RaysAmount of occlusion rays. A high value will produce less noise but will be longer to compute.
Min Occluder DistanceMinimum distance where the occlusion rays will hit the high poly geometry.
Max Occluder DistanceMaximum distance where the occlusion rays will hit the high poly geometry.
Relative to Bounding Box

If enabled, ray distance computations are based on the normalized space (0 to 1) of the low-poly mesh. If disabled, the ray distance computation is based on units specified in the low-poly mesh when it was exported (meters, centimeters, etc).

Spread AngleMaximum spread angle of occlusion rays. Default is 180.
Distribution

Angular distribution of occlusion rays.

Possible values:

  • Cosine (default)
  • Uniform
Ignore Backface

If enabled, occlusion rays ignore hits on a backface (if the high poly normal faces the opposite direction as the low poly from where the ray is fired). Most of the time this setting should be enabled to avoid artifacts.

Self Occlusion

Matching by name for occlusion rays. Indicates how the bakers should match low and high-poly geometry. It can be used to filter the baking process without the need to manually move apart (explode) meshes.

Possible values:

  • Always (default): Low-poly mesh is matched with every high-poly meshes.
  • By Mesh Name: Filter the meshes by their name to avoid matching with unwanted geometry.

To learn more about matching geometry see: Matching by Name.

Map Type

Defines the type of the output texture.

Possible values:

  • World space
  • Tangent space (default)
Normal Orientation

Controls the normal format of the output texture if Mat Type is set to Tangent Space.

Possible values:

  • OpenGL
  • DirectX (default)

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