Noobish question here. Basically, I downloaded a high poly model from the sketchup warehouse and then proceeded to remove vertices (in blender) and make new vertices until eventually I had a very low poly mesh. However, both of the meshes have vastly different UVs and as of now, I was unsuccessful in baking the high poly to low poly in substance painter. Help appreciated.
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Also, I should point out that the reason the High Poly mesh has so many little pieces is literally because it is made of tiny pieces instead of big meshes. Or something f.ed up when I went through the process of .skp > ASCII .fbx > import to 3DSMax > export as .fbx > import to Blender
After a few days of searching and learning how baking works, I can say that no, UVs have very little role in the process so their alignment doesn’t matter. Baking basically happens by the low poly mesh shooting a beam along each of it’s normals to see where it collides with the high poly mesh and basically writes the high poly normals in that place. This post didn’t get very much traction so I doubt I’ll get any better reply than that.
The most important thing in baking setting the rear and front distances which have to be set per each mesh. Basically they dictate how far the beam will go in the front of the face and in the rear so for example, you used a decimate modifier (Blender) on your mesh, it often tends to change the basic shape of the mesh and the low poly can either overlap the high poly in some places and in some places go under the high poly. In cases like these, I have found the higher frontal distances to be most effective when high poly is above the low poly mesh and higher rear distances to be most effective when low poly goes above the high poly mesh. It really depends on your own mesh and how different your low and high poly meshes are. Hope this helps someone in the future.
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