Hi I've baked serveral normal maps in Blender and found it was a world of pain. When it comes to box modelling I think may be it's better to separate normal and mesh in designing stage and do normal mapping only in Substance Painter.
Do you think it's a good or bad?
Hoping to see your feedback and thank you so much for this awesome course!
Hey relidin , definitely give it a shot! At the moment there's an unresolved bug that's making baking in blender a bit of a pain (https://developer.blender.org/T60428), but in general I find that Blender is easier only because it's faster to iterate with. Substance has mostly the same "gotcha's" as Blender (cage needs to be a certain way, the correct edges need to be marked sharp and as seams, etc...), but in order to fix them you need to do the whole export/import thing again and it gets tiring when working on complex objects with many parts. For simple objects though, it works great. Also be aware that you won't be able to use the bevel shader in Substance, so you'll need to bevel the actual mesh of the high poly, which definitely takes time.
That said, I'm all for whichever tool gets the job done. If you're totally sick of baking in Blender (been there!), and Substance makes it so that you are able to complete the project with more sanity intact, definitely do it.
Hi Jonathan, thanks for the reply!
What I meant by separating normal and mesh at designing stage is, ex:
1. I draw a concept art of a scifi box
2. I separate my design to 2 parts:
3. Export the mesh with normal map and metallic/smoothness map to Unity
May be I can draw AO in Substance as well?
This idea came from another CGCookie course about "creating assets for a tower defense game". In practice blender didn't even allow me to align my brush (line) to the grid which made my life quite miserable :(
After all I'm learning to become an indie game developer and want to convert my design from concept art to game ready assets as fast as possible. So I hope to figure out how to pipe-lining everything in most efficient way. Thanks!