Hard, pixelated edges on substance renders

grasslemon

Hello!

I've finished  a few Substance materials recently, and I'm having trouble rendering them properly in the in-built Substance renderer. Attached is a concrete sidewalk material overgrown with lichen: my issue is how jagged the edges of the tiles look when the shadow contrast is stronger, yet seem alright and show more detail in the second render, where the light is more diffused.

Is that a problem with the mesh, one of the maps, of the light or render setup I'm using? I've seen most people use Marmoset for rendering their materials, would that be a workaround? The  texture size is 4k.

I'd greatly appreciate the help!

gnoop

Just make a small bevels on tiles edges by curve node before slope blur of whatever you have used for  edge erosion   and they wouldn't be looking  so harsh and vertical cliff like

grasslemon

Hi, unfortunately that doesn't work. Even with edges rounded off I'm still getting the same harshness.

gnoop

Yeah. it's tricky and require very subtle curve node touch  in openGL preview  with a bit miss and hit.     I always struggle to get a nice  height profile  out of SD tools .  Only able to tweak it right with wacom pen by super small moves of those nodes.

  Contrary to what people typically believe  I don't think SDesigner  would do you nice  new texture by just another sead or sliders  .   It's all like a house of cards  there.  A very subtle tweak  and it looks real  , another  touch and it's  often  not anymore. 

Other approach could  be just using other   custom HDRI with  less contrast, milder  lighting, bigger  sun radius   . Something you could render  with sky system in a 3d package rather than photos.  

And finally you could try more tessellated mesh .

Kanni3d

Surely just a very minimal global blur would help ease that super sharp transition? Editing the curves like gnoop mentioned would also make most sense to manipulate the falloff.

Zoom into your raw grayscale masks (whatever is being used to tessellate) and see how it falls off from white/grey to black/dark grey

grasslemon

Thank you, will give modifying the curves a go

poopipe

yeah - the heightmap basically goes from black to white over 1 pixel , you can tell cos it's 90 degrees. You need a slight slope on everything or you'll get pixel related artefacts.


also you realise tessellation never happens in shipped titles right?  it's almost always cheaper to model the detail