Generally, baked in highlights tend to look crap with specular systems, unless they are really subtle, the kind of 'baked highlights' you see in non specular graphics tend to look crap when the shine goes on. To do that, the little specular highlights need to be baked onto the difuse, otherwise in sl if someone doesnt have their advanced lighting on the texture just looks like I sent you an IM in world, Republic I am not sure how to do this, could you please explain? What i have been trying to do is make a proper bumpy looking leather texture. I am exporting OpenGL, I am exporting only Diffuse, Specular & Normal maps and I am not trying to bake 'shadows' per se.

Substance Painter is great, but it's not really setup for the diffuse/bump/spec model that SL uses and most substances tend only work well with PBR metal/rough shaders (although substances from Allegorithmic's Substance Source usually work well with diffuse/spec if they're dielectric). Another thing I often do to get that unrealistic 'SL look' of lots of heavy AO is to add a couple of multiplied fill layers with the Substance Painter generated AO textures on top of everything else, even after I've added a couple of AO smart masks. The real pain with that is it only seems to work if you're working with the PBR shaders.įor the times when I have wanted shadows I've just baked the shadow maps in Blender and then added them as fill layers in Substance Painter. If I want some subtle shadows, then as you say the baked light material/filters work well (there's one with lights as well as environment too which is useful). I generally avoid baking actual shadows into textures now as I think a lot of people have shadows enabled in their viewers.

Arnold substance painter