Minor Project: Interesting Displacement Map Results & Experimenting with Substances/Lighting

I wanted to work more with the shaders and lights in Arnold so I can become more accustomed to them since I feel like I still struggle with them at times. I decided to work with another substance file (in this case a snow substance) since I'm planning on reverse engineering some of the substances on this site in hopes I get used to Substance Designer a bit more (I'm trying to take things one step at a time so I'm focusing on Arnold for now rather than creating my own substances as well as learning more about Arnold). I may try using the maps I made for this test and see what I can do with it on the aiStandardSurface shader on its own then I'll attempt to create some colour maps for it too. There are also some Smart Materials available on Substance Share that I may try out too - although they are more orientated for Substance Painter and I'm not completely sure how to import those into Maya just yet.

I decide to start with the height/displacement map since in my last experiment I found things got a bit buggy when I worked on the base colour, roughness, and other channels first. Weirdly enough, I actually found the initial displacement really beautiful even though it was obviously not what I was looking to achieve. Since Dysmorphia, I feel I am better able to see the beauty in the weird, glitchy, broken parts of Maya. Perhaps this odd quirk is something I could/should explore more since I feel it's interesting. I also wonder if displacement maps could be a way I could do things such as morph a more organic shape into something such as a crystal (or at least something crystal-like).

Once I toned down the displacement, I applied the other parts of the substance to the aiStandardSurface shader. It took me a while of fiddling with the normal maps to get them to work relatively alright - they looked very strange initially (a similar problem I had on my previous test with the tiles). For some reason they tend to look very obvious and extreme...I'm unsure if it's because it's clashing with the displacement map or if the colour mode is wrong (although it gets greyed out to 'colour management off' automatically and I cannot change anything on it). Playing around with the exposure on the image seems to help me control what the normal map does.

I also didn't include the 'Metallic' portion of the substance as that gave me some weird results. I think I'd prefer to go with a more icy vs snowy appearance for this material, so I look forward to exploring it some more. I do feel I'm starting to understand Arnold a little bit more including the rendering process (choosing where to increase samples), the shaders, and lights. Again, I feel the broken displacement maps could be something interesting to explore as well although I'm unsure how that would effect the rest of the material if using image files.