Did some more testing and figured it out. Substance by default uses 16 bit to display the normal map. I was exporting at 8. Exporting a 16 bit png fixed the noise issue.
Are those official Allegorithmic Materials ? There are not in the default shelf shipped with Substance Painter 2.0. Feature wise they are identical, the differences are the price and the licence. More info here : https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/license-comparison
did some more work and imported these assets into cryengine: SB_cryengine_ss15062014 by sprunghunt, on Flickr the man on the end is the default cryengine character - just to check scale. Edit: I switched engines to cryengine for a change.
Btw there is a little bug there: After I loading the board and try to zoom any image, it first reset the image to default sizes and only then starts to zoom... that is kinda annoying me every time...
I'm not sure if this is the problem, but it's worth checking. See if the image is set to CMYK mode under the Image>Mode menu. Photoshop defaults to CMYK for new documents and that could cause the difference in color display.
A quick way I make colour maps is by using the lambert colours and baking them out with the default blender renderer. I usually just set it to the "textures" bake out. It's not perfect but it works.
Likes, followers and following galleries are live! http://www.artstation.com/artist/Muzz/followers If they keep up the improvements at this pace, it's a great sign. Edit: Why do you follow yourself by default haha.
further fun with creepy crawlers. turns out the default legs are super dark so the textures don't have to be too complicated. some weird lighting things ingame, to be figured out eventually.
Am I missing a step or something. FBX won't export averaged normals, but it should if they are set to be the default normals through the transfer attributes- normals tool right? It seeming like this is impossible to do.
One other thing that is confusing is I thought the default character size is 96 units (6ft) tall, but in this picture it is about 18 squares tall. I'm not sure how many squares = 1uu.