Height Based Brush in Painter?

David Somers

Hi all! So I was trying to paint dirt on and around rocks and tiles for a flooring project. The target engine this is going into lacks good vertex painting blend support, so I'm resorting to larger texture sheets to have it painted into a larger diffuse instead.

Trick is I wanted to utilize height maps for where the dirt/sand collects. So that when I start painting it'll fill the low areas first before filling the high spots. But instead of blending with the normal map on the layer below, it will need to paint over with the new material. For instance in my project I'm making a stone and brick tower stair case. Intermittently I wanted to have broken spots in the wall with some debris. None more convincing than dirt pouring out from spots in the wall, with some fallen bricks.

I probably could get away with basic brush settings but it would be much easier if it painted into low areas first. Any ideas and suggestions would be great!

musashidan

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. If you mean something similar to building up clay from high to low in Zbrush then I don't think it's possible. SP is just -1 to +1 white-black-white and isn't dynamically depth based. I may be wrong on this but that's my assessment. 

David Somers

Yeah that's basically the general idea of what I was trying to accomplish, but I figured it was worth a shot. If I scrutinize on my painting and layers I might be able to achieve something close to that. But kinda on the same note, is there a way to paint over a layer and not combine the painted info with the other layer's normal map?

Even if I pile a lot onto a brush it still usually retains some of the normal of what's beneath in my layer stack. Least to say, if I do manually paint the dirt/sand it wont look as convincing if both the normals keep blending.

Jerc

By default, the height channel blending mode is Linear Dodge(Add). You can change it to normal if you want your new detail to override the layers underneath.

David Somers

That good sir is a good step in the right direction! Many thanks, I at least have an alternative.