Height Map Baking Incorrectly

[Haggets]

Hello! I've been using Substance Painter for a while, and have never had this happen to me before. I am using Steam's Substance Painter 2022, and when baking the height map, it seems to have some strange triangle artifacting that make the texture in Blender look very wrong, despite the texture seemingly being fine on Substance Painter. Is this how a baked height map is supposed to look like? What could be the problem?

[Cyril Dellenbach · Accepted solution]

Hi @Haggets,

Thanks for the question.

I know this can be disturbing, but this is how the Height map is supposed to look.

The Height map exported from Substance 3D Painter is made to work on mesh tesselated with simple subdivisions (unsmoothed), but not with Catmull-Clark subidivisions (smoothed).

Inside Blender, try to use the Subdivision Surface modifier, and turn its mode to Simple. The map should work properly.

With that being said, considering the screenshot sent, I don't think this specific project needs a Height map, and the Normal map should perfectly do the job 🙂

Best regards,

[The_Distiller]

Any chance we could get an option in the baker to choose between unsmoothed and smoothed?

[JurandM]

Sadly, we are talking here about model properties itself (how the normal axis are created - hard or smooth), its not related to baker properties.

[The_Distiller]

Let me rephrase the question then. Will we in the future be able to output heightmaps that work with Catmull-Clark subidivisions (smoothed)?