Author Topic: How to lower the thickness of bevels when painting height maps? (Read 4023 times)

franman · **on:** August 23, 2019, 06:16:35 pm

I have a fill layer with only the height channel enabled along with a black mask.

The alpha brush I used to paint white on the black mask is a square hard brush. I set the balance and contrast all the way to 1. Despite painting with that hard brush, I still see bevels that are by default a little too thick.

I tried the bevel filter but I can't get it lower than the default thickness of the bevel.

I then tried applying a levels filter and this is as low as I can get it. Please see rectangular bump below.

Is this as low as I can get or is there a better technique to lower the bevel thickness even further? Please share.

franman · **Reply #1 on:** August 26, 2019, 04:29:24 pm

anyone?

CAGameDEV · **Reply #2 on:** August 26, 2019, 05:35:19 pm

Just lower your amount on the layer itself.

Example:

Does this solve your issue?

franman · **Reply #3 on:** August 27, 2019, 06:28:56 am

@CAGameDEV, unfortunately it didn't.

I tried the method you've suggested while it does decrease the size of the bevel the height of the bump also decreases.

CAGameDEV · **Reply #4 on:** August 27, 2019, 11:11:12 am

Is there a reason you're not doing this via geometry?

franman · **Reply #5 on:** August 27, 2019, 03:57:03 pm

The reason being is that painting heights is a lot more convenient and feasible than making high detailed polys and baking them.

It is just that I did not expect the bevels to be this thick when painting with an alpha hard brush.

Jan Hofmeister · **Reply #6 on:** October 14, 2019, 03:48:50 pm

I'm having the same problem. I've been baking height-maps out of 3dsmax to use in Substance Painter, but they get a little too blurry when SP turns these into normals. At first I thought it was just the limit of the texture resolution, but baking the same details out of Max as normal maps made them considerably sharper.

It looks like SP's own method of turning height into a normal map isn't ideal.

gpmail1 · **Reply #7 on:** May 28, 2020, 08:47:35 pm

Adding a Gradient Curve filter helped a little for me. It seems to max out in the size reduction with a balance of .01. So, it helps some, but I'd still like it to be a bit more. I tried applying the filter twice, but that didn't do anything.

I then tried some other things and found something that might work. Filters, from top to bottom, are Blur (optional and set very low (.075 for me) to clean up jaggies, Mask Outline, and Gradient Curve.

I the end, I think this might end up being a job for Substance Designer.