can someone claifiy the difference between SP and SD's height map spectrum?

oraeles77

Substance painter's height map range selector has black in the center and white at the fringes, Substacne designer has black at one end (lowest), with white at the opposing (highest)

so in SP does black in the center represent SP's average height, or does it represent the lowest point?

poopipe

painter goes from -1 to 1, designer from 0-1   . 

black (0.0) in painter is the same as mid gray (0.5) in designer 

oraeles77

poopipe said:

painter goes from -1 to 1, designer from 0-1   . 

black (0.0) in painter is the same as mid gray (0.5) in designer 

you'd think they'd make the exact same colours wouldnt you?

thanks for replying.

poopipe

I wish they did, it'd simplify matters dramatically.

There seems to be a distinct disconnect between the painter team's goals and the goals of the designer/SAT teams.  Painter is an arse to integrate cleanly into a pipeline - massive binary files, not using python for scripting etc. Do not make for happy tech artists

Jerc

The difference is a legacy and workflow one. Substance Designer only started supporting HDR formats recently, while Painter supported it from the get go.

It is also much more practical to visualize a height map for authoring in the 0-1 space, and although visualizing the height map is not super useful in Painter, it is central to the workflow in Designer.

That being said, Painter encodes its height data in HDR, but it reads properly height inputs no matter if it's encoded in the 0-1 range or on a HDR range in a substance material.
If the output format is in 8 or 16 bits in SD, Painter will consider it centered on 0.5, if it's in HDR format, it will consider it centered on 0.