Dev news : more about new Blender workflow (Patreon)

I spent more time refining my workflow with Blender. I can now generate normals/heightmaps from the 3D scene and import those in Substance.

Within Substance, I designed some graphs that merge geometry data (normals, height) from the 3D models, the materials, and the background block geometry.

I also spend a fair bit of time refining and designing graphs to overcome the issues that arise with metal masks; in the case of those Blender-generated models I added some safeguards in the aforementioned graphs to "hide" as much as possible the issues that may arise with masks when mip-mapping is involved.
This involves working with "clefts" or "gaps" in the heightmap, in such a way that the metal mask is sitting right in the middle of the gap. This gap is made deep and wide enough to hide the mask bleeding. It works with my 2K packs and should probably be OK at lower resolutions but I have to run more tests. A perfect result won't be possible without using a shader that doesn't use mipmaps when sampling metal maps (or reflectance maps) OR without Optifine fixing the mip filter option that doesn't currently work.
Of course this trick relies heavily on POM so non-POM shaders won't be able to "hide" the mask bleeding issues. I'll check with those as well to see where we're at.

The block here is of course the Realaccurate smithing table, where I re-designed the hammer and introduced some new pliers today. I made sure to minimize all artifacts caused by POM, carefully tweaking all edges on the colormap, normalmap and heightmap.

Here are some screenshots with Kappa v3.0 T2 and Continuum 2.1 B12.

I'll try adding the rest of the items to the smithing table soon, then I'll switch to other types of blocks so I can add more contents for an upcoming release.

Thanks for your attention and your continued support!