Heightmaps in Marmoset

HammerB

(I´m copying this from the substance designer subforum, seeming that my issue occurs minly in marmoset and no one is asnwering there, maybe here i'll have more luck)

Hi, I'm learing SD and having a lot of fun, but i can't seem to get the grasp on how to make proper heightmaps and how to render them properly inside marmoset.
Just and example:

I'm creating this material of spanish doubloons, It's created with the new shape splatter node. 

It's still a work in progress, this picture is 2k texture, with the tessellation factor to 16 and the scale to 1.

This two are examples from Artstation, from Benjamin Thomas and Rosen Kazlachev



Here's the thing, I manage to get the substance into Marmoset Toolbag 3 easily and i set the material in a primitive created inside marmoset. I crank up the tessellation and i Start playing with the height. And here's where things go wrong:

First of all, PBR values are not the same in both softwares, not even close. But as you can see, I can't seem to get a clean result on the heightmap. It's all spikey and hard to look at even with a good amount of tessellation, Also the tiling is wrong (I have to put it in 4x2 to avoid stretching, but I suppose that is because of the UVs the marmoset's primitives have. The maps in marmoset are 4k.

 I'm having this issue with all my materials, Either I don't understand the variation of presentation in PBR between SD's Renderer and Marmoset's and/or I'm doing something wrong when I build my maps.

Can anyone point me into the right direction? I cannot seem to find any help at all to understand topics regarding heightmaps or how to set up Marmoset properly to showoff cool materials.

Thanks

P.S: This is a brief reference on the maps

EarthQuake

1. Can you post an screenshot showing your material settings?

2. The PBR shaders in Toolbag and Substance are fairly similar but not exactly the same. Some variance is to be expected. However, looking at your render here it appears that the difference is mostly due to the lighting you've set up in Toolbag, rather than any difference in shaders.

3. As far as the displacement goes, it looks like you've set the Scale setting too high in Toolbag. It's difficult to say what other problems you might be having until you sort that out. Generally speaking is good to have some slopes in your height map. Sharp changes in height don't typically work well with displacement mapping as the faces end up stretching on those hard edges.

4. 2:1 uv settings, yeah this makes sense. The sphere primitive's UVs are mapped to the 0:1 space. If you think about it, a sphere's typical UV layout should be twice as wide as it is tall, for instance look at a spherical mapping of the Earth's surface and you'll see what I mean. If you have a custom UV layout you want to use, create it in your 3D app and import that.

HammerB

These are a few updates, both with the same HDR map to compare discrepances, this new sphere in marmoset is brought from max, is a regular sphere with 1 million polys. 
SD: https://gyazo.com/d9514bfdb71a10751ebb7fa0a6036cdb 
Marmoset: https://gyazo.com/7bbad3e0edbbf19f23b73dbe32be090b

The scale was pumped up for showing off the problem, but the thing is that  those jagged edged on the height changes still occur in these new pics, and it's quite annoying when you see other people achieving clean cuts like this example by Kile Horwood.
His heightmap has clean straight level changes, and even with color on the sides! that´s impressive! But i can't do a clean cookie cut to do a gold coin T_T
I feel like I'm missing something super simple but I'm too dumb to notice.

EarthQuake

Yeah this is a good example. The main reason why that works and why yours doesn't is your edges are too sharp.

I did a quick model here to demonstrate the concept, on the left the hexagons have a slight taper to them and a beveled edge at the top. On the right the edges are super sharp.



When I make a clump of these and bake out the a normal / height / albedo, you can see the difference in the slopes:



When this height map is applied, it looks like this:



The version on the left looks cool. On the right, the edges are too sharp and there is no slope, so the color has to try to fit in on a little 1 pixel-ish line there, and you get all sorts of nasty stretching.

HammerB

Then I'll have to play with some bevel nodes on designer to give it that slope, mmmhh, that makes a little tricky how to make sure that maps and masks fit into each other on terms on height and normal mapping, I'm gonna run some tests.

Even if I solve the problem or not, I cannot appreciate enough the time you've taken to explain it to me and answer, EarthQuake. Thank you so much. Let's see whay i can do.

EarthQuake

No problem. Here is an even more simplified/exaggerated example. This time I've got a bigger slope on the left and the right doesn't have any soft edges at all, it's perfectly sharp.



Here the height map picks up the different in height, but it isn't recorded in the normal or albedo because the baker doesn't see the side faces.

HammerB

Now I get it! The heightmap now works MUCH more better (below, just height+ao), it still has some minor issues, but the graph became too complicated for going into that extreme detail, but now I won't make the same mistakes again, future materials and future versions of this one will be way, way, wayyyy better thanks to you.


Here's the artstation upload if you0d like to see it in color https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dEgJQ

Thanks a lot man! It was getting on my nerves and you opened my eyes!

Danface

EarthQuake said:

No problem. Here is an even more simplified/exaggerated example. This time I've got a bigger slope on the left and the right doesn't have any soft edges at all, it's perfectly sharp.



Here the height map picks up the different in height, but it isn't recorded in the normal or albedo because the baker doesn't see the side faces.

This is a very late reply but @EarthQuake how and where were these maps generated? In substance designer? 

EarthQuake

Danface said:

EarthQuake said:

No problem. Here is an even more simplified/exaggerated example. This time I've got a bigger slope on the left and the right doesn't have any soft edges at all, it's perfectly sharp.



Here the height map picks up the different in height, but it isn't recorded in the normal or albedo because the baker doesn't see the side faces.

This is a very late reply but @EarthQuake how and where were these maps generated? In substance designer? 

Modeled in Modo and baked in Marmoset Toolbag.