I suppose you could use a height/bump map as a displacement map, but that will not give you the control that one generated from a sculpt would, and so you would need to tweak the values in the displacement. They are not more detailed, and in fact, since normal maps are not floating-point, they likely have less detail than an EXR height map. The normal maps are simply a conversion of these height maps.

The height maps it makes are internally in HDR space, and thus need to be written out as EXRs (16-bit half should be fine) so as not to lose detail which would occur when going from HDR to the 0-1 range of an 8-bit file. Substance Painter is a paint program (not a modeling/sculpting program) and thus generates all its maps by painting techniques. Substance Painter does not have sculpting tools, and thus cannot generate these displacement maps. A displacement map is one generated by computing the difference between a low res and high res sculpt in a program like Zbrush or Mudbox. Arnold - Substance Painter Substance Painter 2020.1 (6.1.0) ships with Output Templates for Arnold using the aiStandard material. A height map is synonymous to a bump map. You said in the OP that these were coming from Substance Painter as a Height map and Normal map. You'll only need BaseColor, Roughness, Metallic, Normal and Height and Emissive if you have them. Here it's important to discuss the source of the maps. Since Arnold 5 can now support a full Metallic PBR workflow, all you need to do is export your textures from Substance Painter using the PBR MetalRough configuration. I did a few more tests and found a couple of approaches that provide an acceptable match to SP viewport.įirst, I use Arnold 5 UDIM (AiStandard) export preset in Substance Painter to output textures as I am able to get better-matched results with them instead of using Vray UDIM preset for the texture export.Does using Bump for fine details produce less realistic then using normal maps for fine details?

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