yay =) by accident caught a piece on a youtube video that had nothing to do with nothing but helped address the issue that had everything to do w/ everything, lol... well, not that dramatic, but still... as you can see from my exhaustive attempts w/ terrains and the materials applied to them its been crazy trying to pinpoint export/import shader settings that use the texture maps correctly. using the node wrangler in blender for texture import, it does a great job of setting up the materials respective of their proper channels. that in itself was a huge help... im able to generate the maps in 3dc to work with blender, so all my normal, displacement, color, metal, roughness maps get used... sounds like itd be simple, but the shader nodes in blender are brutal =/