[Noob question!] How do I stop blended height shapes from clipping with eachother?

Prutsirs_JayJay

Are sharp masks the only way?
Here's a picture of what i'm talking about in greyscale format.
See how the shapes are penetrating eachother and it doesn't look natural? How do I stop this from happening while also having a natural look to it? Or should I just spend more time adjusting my transform nodes so they overlay less?

Clark Coots

Depends on how you're generating your heightmap. If you're using a tile sampler or tile generator and the input shapes have alot of contrast or gradients in them you'll probably get overlap. You can try to reduce the contrast of the input shape or in the tile gen/sampler increase the color random, which will hopefully sink pieces underneath eachother a bit more. There isn't like a collision per sample, but if you reduce the position random amounts you can avoid overlap. However there is an option if you're using a mask input into tile sampler for "mask map sampling technique" to use bounding box, so depending if you're using a mask that may help. I've made a graph where I have 3 tile samplers with bricks, where none are overlapping (very little position random), and each are at different height values then blend together so there isn't weird clipping. Generally speaking unfortunately there isn't a guaranteed way to not have weird clipping, it's not like Substance is doing a physics simulation of pieces and how they'd lay ontop of eachother, its simple math of blending height values together to get you somewhere close.

Prutsirs_JayJay

Clark Coots said:

Depends on how you're generating your heightmap. If you're using a tile sampler or tile generator and the input shapes have alot of contrast or gradients in them you'll probably get overlap. You can try to reduce the contrast of the input shape or in the tile gen/sampler increase the color random, which will hopefully sink pieces underneath eachother a bit more. There isn't like a collision per sample, but if you reduce the position random amounts you can avoid overlap. However there is an option if you're using a mask input into tile sampler for "mask map sampling technique" to use bounding box, so depending if you're using a mask that may help. I've made a graph where I have 3 tile samplers with bricks, where none are overlapping (very little position random), and each are at different height values then blend together so there isn't weird clipping. Generally speaking unfortunately there isn't a guaranteed way to not have weird clipping, it's not like Substance is doing a physics simulation of pieces and how they'd lay ontop of eachother, its simple math of blending height values together to get you somewhere close.

Right! I'll look into that.
After fiddling with it for the entire day, I found my own way though. Simply putting the core shapes into a levels and making the white value in the greyscale as uniform as possible without flatlining it. If I do this before I throw them into a tiler or a splatter, and then play with the levels again after everything's been tiled and splattered and transformed and blended, I lose barely any detail. Especialy in the normal to height node, which I now discovered even reads the slightest greyscale difference of your heightmap. (Not sure how to put it into words-  but I tried!)

I'll look into your method aswell, thank you for your assistance!

poopipe

If you use the color version of tile sampler etc. You can feed an alpha in with the image inputs and use that for blending instead of max/add-sub