I’ve just learnt how to override height information caused by a lower layer in the stack in Substance Painter. It’s an extremely simple trick I thought was worth mentioning.
Let’s take this creepy mannequin character I’m working on as an example. It has metal caps on its arms, and although the colour looks OK, we can see the bump detail showing through from the lower layers. I’d like for the metal to be smooth instead (the metal layer being at the top of the layer stack).
To do this, change the drop down menu in the layer stack from Base Color (the default) to Height. This will let us adjust both the intensity of said layer, but also the blending mode. On height layers it’s set to Ldge (Linear Dodge), which will retain information for the layers below. Let’s switch it to Normal and it will override the value with whatever is set on the current material. It’s genius!
Adjust the value to blend in some height information from below if desired. How cool is that? Kudos to Michael Tanzillo on Reddit for the answer