Issue Adding Height Detail in Painter - It's Blending instead of Replacing

Golden Yak

I've created a character with a leather hood made of scraps stitched together. I want to use Substance Painter to add the stitches, but I'm running into problems.

I painted the stitches as Height detail on a new layer, but the new height detail I paint is blending with all of the existing height detail beneath it. What I want is for the new height detail to override the existing height detail, so the stitches I paint cover the seams in the hood. What I'm getting is this:

The new height detail of the stitches is blending with the height detail of the seams of the hood, rather than replacing it. I get rows of stitches with the seam obviously running through them.

I've tried changing my Height channel's blending mode to Normal and Replace, but none of them solve the issue. Someone recommended changing my texture set's Normal Mixing setting to Replace, but that just nukes all of my height detail except for the stitches.

Can anyone help? I've seen videos of people painting things like stitches and rivets onto a model and followed along, but I'm not getting the same results I'm seeing elsewhere.

Bek

If "existing height detail" is actual height information in a lower layer, using normal/replace blend mode on the above stitch layer will work. Also make sure if these layers are in group folders, the folder needs its blend mode set to Passthrough.

If the "existing height detail" is in the project's normal map, then you'll have to do as you mentioned and switch the project's normal blending mode, then manually update all your layers that you have contributing to the normals, as they're now overwriting and not blending. (for example all fill layers that have the normal channel active but just the blank/default normal value in them).