Lighting in Substance Painter

[Devriv]

Hello everyone.  I’m very new to Substance Painter and am hoping that I can get help with a few questions. 

First, when I export the diffuse map that is in the 2D view, parts of my objects turn out very dark, regardless of the position of the lights and regardless of whether or not I use the baked lighting filter.  How can I, or is it even possible to, avoid these dark areas?  If there is more than one solution to this, I would greatly appreciate an explanation of each. 

The one and only mention of this problem I was able to find is in a video by Anya Ohmai, where she suggests that the mesh be “flipped”. I don’t understand what she means, and the video was not recent (made before the 2D view export feature).   

Second, is the baked lighting filter actually necessary if I’m exporting the 2D view image to use on my mesh?  I ask because I see the light information baked in the exported 2D image even when I don’t use the baked lighting filter! (Maybe I need glasses :P)

Thank you very much in advance

[OptimoMaximo]

Perhaps a screenshot would help clarify what you mean. The environment lighting in SP is by definition directional as there always is a brighter light source somewhere (like the sun) and as such, one side of the mesh will inherently be darker than the side exposed to that light source. 

The explanation from the video you refer to is most likely talking about the surface normals or the UV shell normals being flipped, although the latter shouldn't matter. 

[Devriv]

Thank you for the reply.  It was a problem with my viewport shading thanks to Blender 2.8’s UI “improvements”.  What I needed was what was called the “textured solid” mode in 2.79.  In 2.8, the lighting and colour settings of viewport shading have to be set to flat and textured, respectively. 

  

[Desiree Moonwinder]

On 12/11/2019 at 2:04 AM, OptimoMaximo said:

The environment lighting in SP is by definition directional as there always is a brighter light source somewhere (like the sun) and as such, one side of the mesh will inherently be darker than the side exposed to that light source. 

I am waiting on a Substance Suite New Year's sale like the Thanksgiving Sale. 

Will I be able to export albedo (at a minimum, preferably normal and specular too) to bake with a Blender lighting rig?

[OptimoMaximo]

4 hours ago, Desiree Moonwinder said:

Will I be able to export albedo (at a minimum, preferably normal and specular too) to bake with a Blender lighting rig?

Sure, Blender now supports PBR workflow and as such, you can export the metal/roughness workflow preset and use that set of textures. Perhaps it may need some adjustments to the roughness using some nodes to make it look right, this i don't know, but it's all there. Just make sure that metallic and roughness maps are set as non color data so that color management does not apply. 

If you intend to use materials in SL though, make sure to export the glossiness in the normal map alpha and the metallic in the specular map. It may need some tweaking afterwards but you'd be using the whole dataset available without wasting resources with empty alpha channels that would be in use anyway.