Substance Painter and D|S Iray
ebergerly
Posts: 3,255
in The Commons
Okay I just saw a video on Substance Painter and I'm real excited. Gotta have it.
But my question for those who already use it:
I saw a couple years ago it implemented an Iray renderer, so can I suppose that by now you can directly export all the Iray-related maps to D|S directly? I want to bring OBJ's in from Blender, paint them in Substance Painter, and send the result to D|S.
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DarkEdgeDesign has a tutorial available here. I purchased it. He includes an export setup for DS and explains what gamma settings to use for each image. You can also watch videos on YouTube and find alternate ways to export. Substance Painter is awesome. It's why I need a new video card.
What I usually do is simply copy over the PBR materials in a directory and apply them in a shader in Daz. I usually end up fiddling around a lot with materials -- it can be useful to create masks and easy to create textures that Substance Painter doesn't 'understand.'
Like if you want, oh, refraction color texture map? You could do it, just use your imagination with what it will end up looking like. Or say you want an opacity map, or translucency weight map, or ... whatever.
Sometimes, due to the quirks of how SP handled height/normals, I end up making a height map in the Roughness channel and using it as a bump/displacement map.
The biggest problem you will run into is the inability to paint across material zones, and, secondarily, SP is pretty awful about normals -- and, importantly, by extension Curvature maps; I find most of the time I use a smart material for inspiration and just build layers myself using Ambient Occlusion baked maps (which SP can make). A lot of the smart materials use curvature maps and similar so end up looking terrible with standard models (IMO).
The maps aren't strictly Iray, they're just maps that can be used in any renderer. A diffuse is a diffuse (also called albedo), bump is bump, metalness is metalness, etc.
I love their built-in materials. Stuff like a "worn copper" preset that has a dirt layer, a worn surface layer, and a base color. Nice.
Interesting...yesterday I had a house object I built in Blender, applied textures in D|S and it looked okay, but I wanted to weather the exterior walls both manually and with layered textures. Scratching my head thinking I have to go back into Blender and clean up the UV's so they match my weathered textures (eg, all the wall bottoms are in the same orientation in the UV map to line up with the texture...). But now I just have to load the OBJ and start painting.
Nice.
TangoAlpha has a great tip for making textures using one material zone in Substance Painter and will work in DS on the same object with multiple material zones. I asked if you could combine two material zones and TangoAlpha suggested this:
QUOTE:
1. I don't know of a way to combine material zones from within SP.
The issue here is that SP creates a texture sheet for each mat zone. Generally I like to be efficient and keep the number of texture sheets to a minimum, thus UVs try to make efficient use of space. If I can fit an entire prop into one map, regardless of the number of zones, I'll try to do it. If the prop is small enough I'll fit two or more to a sheet. I don't have ZBrush, so I can't comment on what that might do to a UV or a mat zone.
In Carrara I save two versions of the prop: the normal one, which is what I'll export for DS, and a special "painter version" This is the one that I strip down to a single shading domain: In the vertex modeller go to the Global tab and just delete all the domains except one. Then rename that last domain to be the same name as the prop. (this is important, because this is the filename that SP will use for the texture sheets, and if you call everything "Texture_0" (a) you won't know what the sheets are for and (b) SP will overwrite them without warning next time you export.)
Export your prop for SP. I always use DXF, because for some reason SP doesn't like OBJ files on my system. DO NOT SAVE THIS FILE IN CARRARA! (or Zbrush etc. at least call it something different if you do. You don't want to be starting from scratch recreating all your shading domains!
When you've exported from SP, you'll have a nice set of maps with all your textures for all your domains. Reload the original prop and start applying the textures. You can apply the same maps to each domain, at least the core maps - colour, bump/normal etc. and just tweak the other settings appropriate to each material.
UNQUOTE
I thought it was doable as long as you assigned color ID maps to the areas? So say you want to make a skin for Genesis and you assign ALL the same color to the skin, all the same color to the nails and so forth to allow the program to work across material zones seamlessly....
I'm not sure what you are saying, RAMWolff... assign in what sense?
When I take a model into SP and use something that generates Normals, or bake a normal map, or use the height map -> Normal Open GL normal, or whatever, there's always a noticeable seam, even when it's just different parts of one material zone.
What you do is in your UV program bring your prop or character into it. Then select all the areas you want to be in a color ID group and assign it a particular color like Blue and then go to the next area. Save that out as a new UV / Color ID set. The UV's SHOULD now be diffuse colored and should show up in SP like that. I've not done that yet but from what I've learned reading and watching vids it works. There is a video on the Allgorythmic channel that walks you through this process but it's for one of the high end modeling programs but it can be done in say "Ultimate Unwrap3D Pro" or any program that supports creating UV's. You can always add a color to each UV area when creating a UV.
I'm just not clear on how that fixes Normal generation.
I would think anything that goes over the material zones with diffuse maps would do the same with Normals or any other map! NO?
Something about how it calculates geometry means that the Normals on one side of a seam are disjoint with the Normals on the other side.
It's apparently a known problem and the suggested fixes are generally 'move the UV seams somewhere out of view'
Hmmm, weird. OK.