displacement

[Abilio5EC9]

Hello

How should we proceed with using displacement when exporting from Substance Designer to Blender?

My question is regarding mesh subdivision in Blender?
How should we handle the mesh that used tessellation in SD when exporting to Blender?

Thanks

[Abilio5EC9]

If the mesh that will be displaced in SD is more complex than a cube or plane:

Does it already export subdivided from Blender?

Thanks

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hello Abilio,

Thank you for the question.

To be sure we're on the same page, a Displacement map doesn't influence the tesselation of a mesh. A Displacement/Height map simply tells where to extrude/move vertices or not.

Considering we usually simply export a Height map from Designer, there are two things that you'll have to handle in your rendering software:

-Height Scale

-Tesselation

The Height Scale is a value that indicates the amplitude of the displacement. Tesselation divides polygons from a mesh, therefore you'll have a better displacement "resolution".

In your case, you can simply sub-divide your mesh in Blender until you have a decent looking displacement. Please note that high level sub-div can have a strong impact on performances.

Best regards,

[davescm]

A couple of additions to Cyril's answer.

In Blender if you use the height map to generate displacement, e.g. in the Cycles renderer use Material > Settings > Surface > Displacement only, you may need to turn down the strength of the normal map to avoid artifacts where the height map and normal map are acting on the same surface points. This is especially relevant if you used a combined height and normal map export from Substance Painter.

Also in Blender, you can turn on the Experimental Feature set in Cycles. That will give you access to Adaptive Subdivision in the subdivision modifier. It divides the mesh based on the camera view so is a very efficient way of getting fine detail in the displacement close to the camera and not wasting subdivision further away. I use it a lot when creating landscapes. The downside is that you have to render to see the full effect, the preview uses a lower subdivision.

Dave