Substance Designer: Displacement/height not working! (Solution)
If your height/displacement map appears to be not working in Substance 3D Designer, here’s the solution for it. Before we begin, a few important things to mention:
- Make sure that you are using a high-poly model, such as “Scene > Plane (hi-res).” Displacement requires a high amount of polydata to work properly.
- Secondly, your height map is probably working, but the amount displayed on the screen is too small, which makes it seem like it’s not working.
Let’s Begin
First of all, make sure your height is properly set/connected:
Then, follow this path: ‘Materials > Default > WorkflowNameYouAreUsing’ and click on the ‘Tessellation + Displacement’ option:
This option will reveal a menu that holds information about Substance’s default material properties. If you scroll down, you’ll see a window labeled as “Height.” Here, we can control our tessellation properties:
On this menu, the “Tessellation Factor” determines how much the display mesh is triangulated/subdivided, resulting in crisper height map information on the screen, but too much tessellation can be demanding on the hardware, so be cautious. The “Height Scale” Factor extrudes the mesh based on the displacement map information, and probably the menu you were looking for.
Important Note: Substance 3D Designer defaults to the original values when you create a new project and sometimes even when you re-launch your existing projects, so keep that in mind.