Yet another problem with substance to toolbag :'(

RossHildick3D

Hello polypeeps.

I've been looking for days for a fix on this and I cant find one anywhere so I'm making my own post.



In substance painter, I have my normals bake from my high-res model and a painted in some height information in addition. Painter then, for those who might not know, combines both maps into a new exported normal map and that is what you're seeing here in marmoset toolbag...

Clearly the normals work but the height information is not as strong as it is in SP. Im sure its not a render/viewport issue. Ive followed all the guides on here about the process of SP>MT with no luck.

Can anyone identify the issue?; I shouldn't have to compensate by making my height too strong in SP, surely?!

AlecMoody

Do you have the xnormal photoshop plugins installed?
Try running a normalize normal map function in photoshop and see if that doesn't change the normals to look more like TB2 in substance. I avoid making large heightmap based normals changes and usually put that stuff into a sculpt so Im not that experienced with how substance handles these kinds of normals tweaks. My guess would be they aren't re normalizing the output in the texture or in the shader and TB2 is normalizing the output in the shader so it looks less intense.

EarthQuake

Can you post a png or jpeg? It's sort of hard to see what the issue is through GIF compression.

RossHildick3D

I don't have the plugin. I can get it and report back but the thing is, I don't want SP to look more like TB, I want it the other way around... the normals are not intense enough in TB for my liking. Thanks for the reply though, makes sense I suppose.

I fixed the issue by exporting the normals separately, getting them into substance designer, cranking the intensity a bit then combining them with the baked normals.

Such a stupid fix - clearly the height info is being lost in the conversion in SP's exporter.

Again though - if anyone can see anything that I'm doing wrong in the settings there let me know. I'd rather id be a user issue on my part.

RossHildick3D

EarthQuake said:

Can you post a png or jpeg? It's sort of hard to see what the issue is through GIF compression.

I can but you can see the issue quite clearly in the gif. There's breakup in the roughness where the normal map is on the left but in the right image its quite smooth, comparatively 

musashidan

SP splits the info to a normal and a height a channel. Try plugging the height map into displacement in TB.

RossHildick3D

musashidan said:

SP splits the info to a normal and a height a channel. Try plugging the height map into displacement in TB.

Doesnt this literally change geometry though? When I do this it just shell-modifier's the crap out of it (for lack of a better term) even at a low setting

Jerc

Are you exporting at the same resolution as your project in Painter? It looks like the normal has a lower resolution on the toolbag screenshot, hence all the fine cracks and details not being visible, but it's hard to say with the gif noise.
Painter exports a normal that combines both bake and heigh/normal channels, the normal you get should be exactly the normal you see in the SP viewport, no need for using the height output.

RossHildick3D

Jerc said:

Are you exporting at the same resolution as your project in Painter? It looks like the normal has a lower resolution on the toolbag screenshot, hence all the fine cracks and details not being visible, but it's hard to say with the gif noise.
Painter exports a normal that combines both bake and heigh/normal channels, the normal you get should be exactly the normal you see in the SP viewport, no need for using the height output.

Yeah, thats what I thought. Thats why I think it must be an issue with the way painter converts the height to normal and blends with the normals: seems like to information is lost in translation.

And yeah, everything has been consistently 2k and exported as 2k, not a size issue

Thanks for the suggestion

Jerc

There can't really be an issue with the height conversion. This hasn't ganged in a while and nobody is reporting a similar issue. What does the normal map look like when you actually look at it? does it look blurry or upscaled?
Although I see that you are using the Blinn Phong reflection model in Toolbag while Painter uses the GGX model. You should already fix this and see if it improves the similarity between the 2.

Nexinumbra

RossHildick3D said:

Clearly the normals work but the height information is not as strong as it is in SP. 

 
Based on your image, you have a displacement map plugged in but the Scale is set to 0.0. Unless I'm missing something I would think that means it's not contributing at all to the mesh.

musashidan

Jerc said:

 
Painter exports a normal that combines both bake and heigh/normal channels, the normal you get should be exactly the normal you see in the SP viewport, no need for using the height output.

Of course! Sorry, my last project involved texturing 40 different meshes and exporting with the vray preset which splits the maps.

RossHildick3D

Jerc said:

I see that you are using the Blinn Phong reflection model in Toolbag while Painter uses the GGX model. You should already fix this and see if it improves the similarity between the 2.

I changed it to GGX which didn't help much, however enabling secondary reflections and also setting that to GGX did actually improve it slightly! Making me think it might be a lighting issue now ... but that doesn't explain how, when I increased the height map and recombined manually in substance designer, I managed to get it looking correct.

Its probably something I'm not thinking about. If I ever figure it out I'll post the solution.