Height Map-Arnold-SSS problem

[themistoklis.deligiannis]

Never had a similar issue before, I am experienced with arnold renderer. I am trying to solve this problem all morning.Any suggestions much appreciated!

I have exported my textures from Substance painter. The boot has 7 objects separated in 5 Udims, everything looks that is working fine on the render view but I have these topology lines on the main piece and the boot part.

I have catclark with 5 iterations in every part

The only way that I found to resolve the topology lines are when I use SSS, but then everything becomes inflated and I am loosing all the details. If I reduce the SSS weight the lines start appearing again. the settings of my normal map and height map and SSS are in the image below. Any ideas anything really would be much appreciated.

Thank you

[Baboonian]

could you show your displace map?

[themistoklis.deligiannis]

thanks for the reply and help here is my displacement, since it is an exr I screenshoted it hope you can see it.  But I think it has to do with the normal map, I was looking at the normal map and it looks like it has the lines baked for some reason, maybe thats the reason that is happening.

[Baboonian]

Hmm, I couldn't get a look at the denormalized displace map.

I think you should subdivide your target mesh into several iterations to bake the clean maps. 

[themistoklis.deligiannis · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the help anyways!

I found the solution about the topology lines!

You just have to soften the edges before importing the mesh in SP then bake the maps like you normally do. Then export the textures and everything looking great! The image below is without SSS everything looking that is working.

The issue now is with the SSS, if the weight is 1 the mesh gets inflated and you lose all the details from the maps.  I am not sure if that meants to happen when you apply SSS on an object and if the scale of the object also affects the SSS. I will have to look more into that and I will update once I find a solution for the SSS inflation 🙂

[themistoklis.deligiannis]

As far as SSS is concern, the only way I found is to use values of 0.1-0.5 on the weight in order to try to maintain all the details from the maps. With 0.5 being the most extreme and you lose lots of micro details. So in my case a value of 0.2-0.3 works fine as I am looking for a more stylized look as you can see below. Thats my render view.

If anyone has a better way, or any suggestion let me know. But thanks for the help!