I'm going to apologize in advance, I get wordy when asking for advice on forums. I figure more context and detail is better than less. There's a tl;dr at the bottom.
I'm having an issue that seems like it would have an easy answer if I knew how to properly word the Google search. For context: Basically, at work we need a good, seamless texture of vinyl dutch lap siding. Essentially this siding. That's unfortunately the best page I can find that shows pictures of this style; CertainTeed's website has all the technical specs but the pictures are all of a different kind of siding. I've tried to find or make good texture maps for it multiple times over the last couple years, but no luck so far. Our company likes everything to look clean and new, which doesn't mesh well with the "imperfection is digital perfection" motto everyone else in 3D adheres to. Most of what I find is the wrong kind of siding, low quality maps like we've been using, or ones made to look grimy and old.
Modeling itself is always what I've been best at, so I had the idea to just model one siding panel in Blender and use array modifiers to build a wall. My theory being I could take an orthographic render, drop it into Substance 3D Sampler, and create the maps I need from there. So I made the model and rendered it at 4k square resolution. But Sampler's Image to Material AI doesn't understand what it's seeing as well as I'd hoped, and I don't know the other Substance programs well enough yet to see if they'd have a solution. Messing with the sliders in Sampler doesn't seem to help much in this case.
So then I tried to make a "normal" material in Blender hoping I could just render a normal map, thinking that would make it easier to get accurate displacement in Sampler. It seemed like a good theory, but the forums I found discussing it were for older versions of Blender and the node workflows don't seem to fully translate to 3.1.2. Below is my mesh with the "normal" matcap applied, which I was trying to replicate through nodes.
This is one of the node setups I found that is supposed to work, but both Cycles and Eevee produce a flat grey material when rendered. The top window is set to the render preview.
I'm admittedly a novice when it comes to Blender's shading nodes. I've watched many tutorials in the past but don't mess with shading often enough to retain the information. Things get fuzzy when I try to learn the technical details behind how the nodes work. This is the 2nd method I found to try; the first involved using the Power node in an older version of Blender, but that's been merged into the Math node in 3.1.2 and seems to work a little differently. I can install the older version of Blender on my home computer to test if I need to, but I'd have to deal with my company's firewall again to install another version of Blender at work.
So today I've been trying to bake it. I know that's mainly for applying detail to a lower-res version of the same model, but I figured it was worth a shot. I made a duplicate of the arrayed panels, applied the modifiers, unwrapped the UVs for the entire thing, and have been trying to bake the normal map to a flat plane using this tutorial. Which sorta works, but gives this result:
All this to ask, am I missing something? All I've ever learned is how to make an image seamless and use it to create texture maps in Photoshop, but what I remember of that knowledge is failing me for this. Which isn't surprising, that class was 7 years ago now. I guess there's not enough information in just an image to make the panel's gradual curve back and up. Everything I try just gives me weird grooved results like in this screenshot in Substance:
I feel like there's a way to do this I'm just not finding. Materials from Poliigon and Adobe's own asset catalogue have a wild amount of detail and depth to their normal and displacement maps that I can never seem to replicate, is that all done in programs like Substance Designer? It seems logical to me that they'd occasionally us an actual 3D model for materials they can't find or take high-quality images of.
Tl;dr - I don't know how to properly make the normal and displacement maps I need for dutch lap siding and can't figure out if rendering an actual 3D model of a wall is a good solution, or if I just need to buckle down and learn how to use Substance Designer.
