Always soft edges when exporting

[lucialeila]

Hi everyone. I have this model on Maya, I put all the edges i wanted soft on soft edge, and same with hard edges:

But when i export it in FBX and open it in Substance Painter, everything looks soft

I've tried everything:

I put all edges and objects in hard edge, nothing.

I imported the FBX to a new Maya file, exported that as an fbx, nothing.

I placed a platonic solid next to it and exported to substance, the platonic looks hard, but not my model.

I baked it in substance, still nothing.

I've ran out of options, please help meeeeeeeeee!

[daunish]

What's troubling about this is you said you exported another object and brought it into painter and it retained the hard edges. So it's not how you're exporting, it has more to do with the object you're exporting.

Could you upload your model? We could see if it's a problem just on your end.

I know my workflow with Painter, and usually, I totally ignore what kinda normals I have on my object. You said you tried baking it and that didn't work. But how did you bake it, did you use the same low poly object, or did you bring in a high poly one? Usually, with my Painter workflow, I totally ignore what kinda normals I have on my object, baking is how I fix issues.

[lucialeila]

Yes of course, here's the file:

[daunish · Accepted solution]

When you bring your mesh into Substance you get an error at the bottom of the screen, "Mesh Normals are Invalid". This is the cause of your problem. It hits an error, and instead of trying to load it in as you see it in Maya, it just rebuilds your normals for you. Resulting in a soft normal object.

I looked into this a bit, basically, your object has a lot of things wrong with it. I'd recommend doing a cleanup:

Cleanup Options | Maya 2019 | Autodesk Knowledge Network

Check on and off one setting at a time as set it to select problem faces, then fix them. Some of the issues I saw on your geo aren't super important, others could cause serious problems for you or another artist. Clean the problem areas and you shouldn't have any more issues. Going forward I'd recommend trying to keep your model as clean as possible when constructing it, it's easier than having to go back.

If you don't wanna bother with fixing your object, you can pull it into substance as an obj. It didn't seem to have to rebuild normals when going that route, but I don't know what other problems you'll run into that way.

Good luck!!

[lucialeila]

That was it! Thank you so much 🙂