Substance Designer always exporting terribly noisy normal maps?

elios

Hey, Polycount
So I ran into an issue which I haven't really encountered or noticed before - any normal map that I export from SD ends up having lots of noise, unless I export pure normal color, or so it seems. Even when I fill the noisy areas with pure normal color, it doesnt actually remove the noise, it just reduces it. I normally export as TGA because of my engine importing quirks, my heightmaps and nodes are all 16 bit.

Needless to say, this is really bad for my case, since the compression in my engine exaggerates the noise even more. 

elios

Also, it seems that SD node previews dont have any noise, only exports, including both png and tga.

elios

Okay, so a little update, exporting as PSD gets rid of all the noise. Thing is that at the very least, I never noticed that either tga or png have this much noise in what are supposed to be blocks of solid color, not even gradients. Is it expected from such formats? I always assumed that at least tga is lossless. 

poopipe

tga doesn't do 16 bit so it's probably dithering the output - there may be an option for disabling the dither(not sure, haven't used TGA since about 2011). 

if you're exporting 8bit png the same is probably true