Substance Designer / Painter - Heightmap best practices

dirigible

What are the best practices for working with height maps in Substance Designer and Painter?

For instance if I'm making a clutter substance that adds bullet casings onto a base floor material, what should the height range on the casings be? What about the floor?


Should black be considered "neutral", and grey/white are "up", or should grey be neutral, black is down, and white is up?
I'm getting some strange behavior from the material blend node, so I wanted to check and be sure I'm doing things correctly.

For reference, here's what I'm working on. I'm blending many different substances together to create a procedural clutter substance that I can drag onto any floor material I want.

Jerc

I'd say in general, considering mid-gray the neutral height is best. It's how it works in Substance Painter when you import a Substance and that's how all our in-house materials work by default. It allows you to get negative and positive values without having to resort to HDR formats.

poopipe

It can be a bit weird setting heights on materials that you want to use in Painter.  A lot of issues go away if you put a base fill layer with neutral values at the bottom of your layer stack as it means you're not compositing values over a transparent channel. 

dirigible

Thanks guys!