I first discovered this issue in Unity, but didn't get around to figuring out how to fix it until Iray made it painfully obvious.
The Normal-to-Height works great for natural surfaces, but it leaves warps in a hard flat surface design. I've begun making my own height maps with flat grayscale values and the results are beautiful. But it's time-consuming.
I was hoping there was some nodes or method I've missed, to get a really clean height map for flat surfaces (I've been using masks and playing with grayscale values to build my own height maps). Messing with the frequencies on a Normal-to-Height doesn't help.
I've posted some screenshots. The first is the standard normal-to-height which causes wonky ripples in the pattern, and the second is one I put together for the same design to create clean flat heights. (There is some sleight grayscale variation because I masked off some pieces so they wouldn't bleed off into each other and cause ripples.)
The results I get with flat grayscale values for a hard-surface pattern are night and day difference, especially in Iray. It looks amazing. I'd love a way to do this faster.
