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Participant
September 22, 2026
Open for Voting

Feature Request: Per-stroke Normal blending mode (Replace/Overwrite) in Substance 3D Painter

  • September 22, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 8 views

When painting multiple strokes on the same layer, the Normal channel blends strokes in an additive/accumulative way by default. There is no brush/stroke-level option to make a new stroke replace or overwrite the previous stroke’s normal information. To achieve an overwrite result, I have to either change the layer blending mode or create a new layer for every stroke. Creating many layers hurts performance and makes the project messy; changing the layer blending mode affects the whole layer and does not solve per-stroke behavior.

 

    1 reply

    Participant
    September 22, 2026

    I have had to give up using the Normal channel and switch to the Height channel instead. However, when no Height maps are available, I often have no choice but to convert Normal maps into Height maps. This is not only inconvenient, but the resulting Height channel is often quite poor, and height discontinuities frequently appear along the edges.