Substance Painter Baked Lighting filter help

[blahinos]

Hello, I've recently gotten into 3d modeling (Blender) and texture painting (Substance Painter), and I'm having some difficulties.

I want to learn how to bake lights in Substance Painter for the objects I make in Blender. When I make textures, it looks good in Substance Painter while I'm on the Materials view channel and you can see how the lights reflect on all the metals, woods, seams etc, but then when I export the textures, the diffuse (base color) texture looks very flat and dull. I do also bake a normal and specular texture but this doesn't change the fact that the exported diffuse texture seems to be unusually dull.

I've watched tutorials, and learned that the way to do this in Substance Painter is to add a baked lighting filter in the layers panel - which should bake some lighting/detail onto the diffuse texture.

I followed this tutorial here but it didn't really work for me. The baked lighting filter only makes my object slightly darker or lighter but doesn't add any real detail or lighting like it does in the video. Most of the sliders like the vertical and horizontal angle for the sun don't work for me. Any advice? I would really be grateful

[OptimoMaximo]

3 hours ago, blahinos said:

Any advice?

Use the regular export texture and bake within your 3d app using the environment lighting and additional light sources of your liking. 

[MaxMare]

Based on what you said, I have a hunch you are working with your viewport set to "Material" instead of "Base color", so as you work you keep seeing Sunstance render but once you export textures you get base material+lighting filter...You also need to add baked lighting to your export preset.

A few more tips for getting a good result: Substance works best with meshes with good edge flow, decent overall geometry and properly connected (not just put a cube inside a cube as I`ve seen in so many tutorials cause intersection won`t bake well)..you should also learn how to set up your file properly. When it comes to materials, don`t just use presets, look into creating your own smart materials so you have better understanding of what each effect, filter, generator etc and material component does. Baked lighting/environment filter can be used for entire stack or you can utilize masking  and have different settings for each group/material separately. 

Substance also offers 2d view export since some time last year, which means you get the exact same texture as rendered in Substance (you can change environment preset or add your own, rotate it etc for different result), if you don`t have this option, then you need to update to a more recent version. 

Not that anyone asked lol, but I prefer baking in Max with materials created in substance (diffuse, roughness, normal+height and specular) and lights set up as I want them to be cause Max offers much more freedom and realism  in that sense (you can dl photometric data from professional lighting  web sites)... alternatively, export 2d view and just bake light maps then make composits in PS (works well with natural and monochrome lights)

If you need more help, Substance painter has their own channel  on youtube and a very good tutorial series that covers pretty much everything you could possibly need, I believe they even offer file download so you can learn with the same object  (you can find links on their web site under tutorials). It is made with a slightly older version but nomenclature is the same so you shouldn`t have any issues following the series.

PS: It would have been better if you posted what you made, would be easier to pin point what went wrong

[Devriv]

I’m new to SP myself, having installed it a few months ago.  Just a few things I’ve learned and that may be of help:

1.  When opening a new project, use the “PBR – Metallic Roughness (Allegorithmic)” Template, and, if planning to export normal maps, change the Normal Map format from DirectX to OpenGL (SL viewers use OpenGL). 

2.  Here I’m working on some ice-skates for a friend.  Although everything else looked good, the metal blades were being exported without the details I was seeing in the 3D and 2D views.  So I added the Baked Lighting Environment filter above the metal layer in the layer stack. That way, it will only affect the metal and none of the other layers above.  Also, for the filter to work properly, allowing you to use the lighting parameters, drag an environment map to the environment map slot under image inputs in the filter’s properties panel.

3.  Optimo’s method gives you the most freedom with a particular lighting setup should you need it, but it’s not the only mode of export.  If you’re happy with the combined/diffuse texture you see in the 2D view, you can export it exactly as seen in the 2D view.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Alternatively, don't generate PBR maps at all, setup diffuse/normal/specular outputs in substance, configure them to auto save on change, hook those textures as temporary textures in your viewer, and use SL itself as your preview window, rather than substance's preview