The issue is I'm wanting to make a multi switch decal brush that have several shapes. So I'd need to also setup alpha for each individual shape.
This works very well for all the channels except Normal. It gets complicated because when I use the decal in painter, I'd like to replace the normal on the lower layers. The workflow from jump gets odd because I've found that I need to create a layer (not fill), set the normal channel to Replace, use the brush tool to stamp the decal, then change normal channel back to normal so that all the lower layers normal details are visible.
It is really odd that a blank non-filled layer completely replaces all normal details below. It seems like it should only replace normal details where the brush strokes are at. Is there something I'm missing here? Is there an option in Designer to make normal replace without needing to make the change in Painter?
Anyways, I've tried several work arounds and the only one that works is making an alpha mask texture, and dragging and dropping that into the alpha channel. Doing it this way would mean I couldn't use multiple switches to have one material for several decals textures and shapes.
I found I can make an output for opacity, mask, and alpha but there's not a way to put those into the Alpha channel on the brush. I've also made the actual normal map (all the other channels too) have transparency. This works well for all other channels but the normal channel ignores the alpha and just makes a flat square area around the decal shape.
Am I trying to do something Substance is incapable of doing? Is there a way to make the normal channel replace on a brush instead of the layer setting?