Mountain workflow - Substance Designer to Zbrush with new bake afterwards

gestoryscht

Hi everyone,
I used Substance Designer to generate some neat mountains with some snow on top.
My plan was to generate a Height Map with Designer to get a Basemesh for sculpting in ZBrush. After finishing the sculpt, I generate a new Height Map with xNormal and the result will be loaded in Substance Designer to get the snow (and some other textures).

This was the plan, but it failed.
The problem, the new baked height map texture is by far not that great. A whole level of detail vanished.

This is the height map generated with Substance Designer



vs the baked one from xNormal (and the bake had 32 Bit, reduced to 16 Bit in Photoshop)



How to solve it?

Ahhh and by the way - the sculpt had enough displaced geometry in the black areas.
Is there a maximum xNormal can handle? The mesh is pretty big scaled ... but otherwise, I scaled it down for testing purpose.

gnoop

Xnormal by default clips the range in Heigh map Tonemapper.  It has sliders showing red an blue clipped pixels. Adjust them.    Also you don't need xNormal probably , just  BPR render   the mountain top down in zbrush and get 16 bit depth image

gestoryscht

I used the Tonemapper and this image isn't clipped
But I think the BPR Method will work. Using the Depth Map as Height Map?

Isn't there a way to create brushes? Yeah, of course! Creating a great 8k Brush. Thanks for your tip!