displacement : Substance designer

Hello,

This mesh deformation technique is called 'tessellation displacement' and involves subdividing the mesh at runtime then moving its vertices. The distance of this movement can be controlled using a height map. The technique offers better results with a mesh that features a uniformly dense topology.

In Designer, I recommend the 'Sphere 2-tiles', 'Rounded cylinder', 'Rounded cube' of 'Plane (hi-res)' models for viewing materials using displacement. You can learn more about using tessellation displacement in the 3D View here.

In the most common implementations of this technique, the vertices are moved in the direction of the mesh's normal.  This means the result will directly depend on the normals. For instance, if two faces belong to different smoothing groups, then they will be moved different directions, resulting in splits as in the gray cube shown in your first image example.

For UV-mapped meshes, splits can occur at the border of UV islands.

In UV-less workflows, triplanar mapping can indeed prevent this as there is typically an interpolation between the three mapping directions, and this interpolation smooths out the transitions which prevents of alleviates these splits.

Unfortunately, Designer does not currently offer a triplanar shader in its 3D View. And in any case, triplanar mapping needs to be implemented and validated in the target rendering engine.

Techniques exist for seamless displacement, but they are still experimental and expensive.

I hope this is helpful and informative! Let me know if you require more information.

Best regards.