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Thickness Map from Mesh | Substance 3D bakers

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    1. What is Baking?
    2. Software interface
      1. Substance 3D Painter
      2. Substance 3D Designer
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    3. Availability per software
    4. Compatible 3D software
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  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

Thickness Map from Mesh

The Thickness map from mesh is very similar to the ambient occlusion baker, but it casts rays from the surface of the mesh to the inside. This texture can be used in a Sub Surface Scattering (SSS) shader or for masking textures.

The texture properties are defined as:

  • Black values represent the thin parts of the model.
  • White values represent the thick parts of the model.

Available in:

  • Substance Painter
  • Substance Designer
  • Substance Automation Toolkit

Parameters

ParameterDescription
Secondary RaysAmount of occlusion rays. A high value will produce less noise but take longer to compute. Default is 64.
Min Occluder DistanceMinimum distance where the occlusion rays will hit the high poly geometry. Default is 0.00001.
Max Occluder DistanceMaximum distance where the occlusion rays will hit the high poly geometry. Default is 0.1.
Relative to Bounding Box

If enabled, units are relative to the bounding box of the object (1.0 being the diagonal length of the bounding box). If disabled, units used for the minimum and maximum occluder distances are the ones defined when exporting your mesh (meters, centimeters or whatever units the exported scene is).

Spread Angle Maximum spread angle of occlusion rays. Default is 180.
Distribution

Angular distribution of occlusion rays.

Possible values:

  • Cosine (default)
  • Uniform
Ignore BackfaceIf 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.

Automatic NormalizationDefines if the output values should be scaled to fit within a 0-1 range (the brightest point is set to pure white and the darkest point is set to pure black).

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