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Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
Hey folks, I’m doing some R&D around Substance workflows and automated texture map generation,mostly as a side experiment. In some cases (quick scans, old assets, noisy photos) I found myself missing a fastway to extract usable height/normal information before bringing things intoSubstance Designer/Painter. So I built a… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
I get that feeling too. A lot of mainstream tools seem to optimize for stability and compatibility rather than radical change. Once a workflow becomes industry standard, everything around it tends to reinforce that direction, because production pipelines depend on predictability.But historically most shifts in content… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
Doesn't looks that way. I had a hope anything convenient would appear soon two decades ago and here we are. In all honesty the content creation software doesn't look like evolving much in general. it evolved and frozen already with a few cosmetic changes each years and rarely something new. It's stack in old approaches ,… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
Yeah, that “camera replacement” feeling is very real. A lot of the work ends up being about compensating for capture problems rather than creating anything new.In theory scanning should reduce manual work, but in practice it just shifts the problem. Instead of sculpting or painting, we spend time fixing lighting,… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
I sorta agree about manual craftsmanship , Designer included . Every time I do a material in Designer I know they are paying me for gaps and mistakes of scanning contractors . And often I just take my own camera at weekends. Feel myself a camera replacement. It's so weird . Yet we are discussing extracting material id… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
Yeah, I can see where that feeling comes from. A lot of pipelines today optimize for scalability and consistency rather than uniqueness. Procedural tools made production much more predictable, but at the same time they tend to converge toward similar visual patterns.At the same time though, I’m not sure the material side… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
Yeah, same here. I tried a few research tools as well, but most of them feel too experimental or slow to fit into a real production workflow.It seems like a lot of these segmentation approaches work in controlled cases, but once you throw real-world textures at them — noise, compression, lighting, material variation — they… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
Yeah, Fiji is interesting. It feels more research-oriented compared to most production tools.That interactive training approach sounds closer to what’s actually needed, since it’s more about guiding region boundaries instead of relying purely on contrast or gradients. The tricky part is always making it consistent and fast… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
That seems to be the common conclusion — it works “almost”, but never reliably enough for production use.Fluid Mask definitely felt ahead of its time in terms of region segmentation. It’s interesting that even today most approaches still operate mostly on gradients and contrast rather than coherent region grouping.I’ve… -
Re: Workflow question: generating height/normal before Substance
Nope , never found a way to do it reliably . I once tried to use a screenshot from fluide mask to turn it into closed segments in Designer . But it not even works anymore.
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