Substance Painter bake issue: high/low mesh with _low/_high suffixes not projecting correctly on one star shaped part
I’m having a really frustrating baking issue between Blender and Substance Painter and I’m not sure what else to try.
I have a model made of multiple separate objects. I made a low poly and high poly version and named the pieces using the _low and _high suffix workflow so I could bake by mesh name in Substance Painter. Most of the model seems okay, but one specific star-shaped piece is causing problems.
When I try to bake, parts of the high poly don’t seem to overlap/project correctly onto the low poly. In the bake preview/debug view, areas show up red, like the cage/projection is missing or not covering the mesh properly. I narrowed it down to this star shape by trying to bake it by itself, but even alone, the cage still does not seem to overlap correctly.
Things I’ve already tried:
- Using
_lowand_highsuffixes with matching names - Baking with “match by mesh name”
- Trying the experimental matching option instead of distance-based
- Trying to use the low poly as the high poly just to test, but I still get artifacts
- Checking the UVs: no overlapping faces as far as I can tell
- Checking face orientation in Blender
- Recalculating/flipping normals multiple times
- Reimporting several times
- Trying to bake this one piece by itself instead of the whole model
The star shape is fairly thin and spiky, with a lot of sharp triangular shapes. I’m wondering if the issue is related to the cage, normals, triangulation, or something.
I attached screenshots of the problem area and the narrowed-down star piece. Any help would be appreciated.