Ah "flag" is what my carpenter dad calls the swirly grain so I will be sending him that reference lol. And I agree with your point about the overlaid look, I think some more creative masking will solve that. And for the short ends for the sake of readability from a distance I might leave it but I am sure I could just…
Use the part where you created the shapes for the nail heads, and run that out as a line to your normal blending. Ideally you'll have a mask that fits inside those holes, blend that with a uniform color of 127,127,255 (flat normal color), and layer that on top of the normal map from the wood.
So this is my first Designer project and I was having a great time up until now. So I am trying to separate the normal information of the nails and the wood grain of this floor texture I am making and I am stuck, basically I would like to mask out certain areas from being affected by the other set of normal information.…