Missing some basic conceptual stuff for Painter...
polycounter lvl 6
First, a couple of pics: 
So I need for the chipped off parts or the damaged parts where the paint has been messed up to use height or normal data to push IN and not out or just float there on the surface. Some of you might be saying, "well yeah, Marius, but we can see that in your second pic, that your damaged wood layer has it's height and normal channels turned off so of course it's going to look flat." but my problem there is that if I turn those on, then I get bumpyness from the damaged wood that comes up through the wood planking of the layers above it and makes them look bumpy in ways that I don't want....which doesn't make sense to me because those layers with their data should occlude what's beneath them, right?
So my question then is, how do I get stuff to look like it's pushed inward and how do I keep data from layers from pushing up through data in other layers? I feel like my mask that's punching holes in my painted planks group to expose the "dmg wood" layer beneath it ONLY where the mask exposes it, should also work for EVERYTHING underneath and not let the bumpy data pass through but it's not doing that so I have the height and nrm channels turned off.
So I need for the chipped off parts or the damaged parts where the paint has been messed up to use height or normal data to push IN and not out or just float there on the surface. Some of you might be saying, "well yeah, Marius, but we can see that in your second pic, that your damaged wood layer has it's height and normal channels turned off so of course it's going to look flat." but my problem there is that if I turn those on, then I get bumpyness from the damaged wood that comes up through the wood planking of the layers above it and makes them look bumpy in ways that I don't want....which doesn't make sense to me because those layers with their data should occlude what's beneath them, right?
So my question then is, how do I get stuff to look like it's pushed inward and how do I keep data from layers from pushing up through data in other layers? I feel like my mask that's punching holes in my painted planks group to expose the "dmg wood" layer beneath it ONLY where the mask exposes it, should also work for EVERYTHING underneath and not let the bumpy data pass through but it's not doing that so I have the height and nrm channels turned off.
Replies
Change the beldning mode to Normal to have the new layer "covering" the previous layer and adding that transition to make it push inward or outward.
If you don't have this parameter, you can add a levels effect on your layer and change the levels on the height channel to increase or decrease the height.