Support Texture Dithering

[haueryou]

Hey guys

Love the products and I wanted to suggest a feature update.  Is there anyway we can get both applications updated to support texture, specifically Normal map creation, to support dithering. 

In this image you can see box A has a dithered normal where box B has a banded normal.  Ideally when I create normals in Substance Designer and Painter they would dither if at all possible.  The way I currently get a substance normal to dither is list below
Step 1: Create normals in substance designer or painter
Step 2: Export normals as 16bit image
Step 3: Open up normals in Photoshop
Step 4: Down sample normals to 8bit and the texture will now be dithered.

Thats it.... If there is a way Substance can be updated to do this, that would be ideal
 

[Cyrille Damez]

Designer applies dithering when exporting to a file format with a lower bit depth than the texture you are saving (which is usually the case with baked normals, because we bake in 32bpc floating point). Painter does not yet.
So if you create your normals in Designer, you should not have to go through Photoshop, just export to a file format that only support 8bpc (e.g. tga).

[haueryou]

Unfortunately exporting from Painter at 8 bit doesnt give you the dither effect.  In the image attached you can see how the results are the same from painter regardless of the bit rate.



Would be great to have a programmer look into this because it really does have a big impact on final normal visual

[Cyrille Damez]

Sorry if I was not clear earlier, but as you were mentioning both Substance Designer and Substance Painter in your first post, I replied that Substance Designer does apply dithering. However, as you have noted, Substance Painter does not yet. This is on our todo list for Painter but I can't say when it would be available.

[haueryou]

Oh makes more sense now.  I personally have gotten into a bad habit of thinking about designer and painter interchangeably. Thanks for looking into this and cant wait for Painter to support Dithering normals.

[Liquidoodle]

Sorry to necro an old thread but I figured it's better than starting a new one about the same issue. I really hope you could prioritise getting this rectified, Designer has had dithering since 2015 and this really breaks a good work flow because I either have to do all my baking in Designer then import to painter or do some weird work around by opening the file in Photoshop. It really does make all results look utterly grim unless it's super noisy or has 100% roughness. Sad times.