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DAZ textures in Substance Painter - big ole rant + questions

SnowSultanSnowSultan Posts: 3,773
edited June 2022 in The Commons

Still no Substance Painter or Zbrush forums here despite most PAs using both to make what they sell here, so here I am again asking for any advice in dealing with the nonsense of trying to set up and edit textures from DAZ products in Substance Painter. Buckle up.  :)

 

* Does anyone have ANY IDEA how to simulate the sorcery behind DAZ's Translucency and SSS settings in Substance Painter? Scattering in SP gives you visible SSS in the preview, but its Iray render makes everything way too light. Translucency doesn't seem to do much of anything, and adding the slightly lighter DAZ translucency texture map doesn't make any difference. Suppose I wanted to precisely paint translucent/SSS areas of a creature wing or a piece of food  - how on earth would you set it up so that Studio would render it properly?

* How do you figure out how much Roughness to put on any surface when you can't also adjust the specular strength to check where the reflections are? DAZ characters, especially 8.1 ones, come with a Roughness map and specular values set correctly, but how can you make new ones in Substance Painter if you can't simulate those Dual Lobe values and such?

* No height maps for 8.1 characters means that elements of the character's morph are always applied when you load in Normals for surface detail even when using a default G8.1 figure. You can see creases under the nose that shouldn't be there, shaded areas for wrinkles where there are none, etc. I assume these would have to be painted out of the normal maps manually?

* 8.1's  AO maps make everything ridiculously dark in Substance Painter if you try applying them to an Ambient Occlusion channel. Has anyone been able to put these to any use, or should you just bake new ones in Substance Painter?

* Is there still REALLY no way to revert a Substance Painter slider to it's default value?

 

That's it for the moment. Thanks in advance for any help.

Post edited by SnowSultan on

Comments

  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,388

    I second this request for information.

  • ChangelingChickChangelingChick Posts: 3,361

    * Does anyone have ANY IDEA how to simulate the sorcery behind DAZ's Translucency and SSS settings in Substance Painter? Scattering in SP gives you visible SSS in the preview, but its Iray render makes everything way too light. Translucency doesn't seem to do much of anything, and adding the slightly lighter DAZ translucency texture map doesn't make any difference. Suppose I wanted to precisely paint translucent/SSS areas of a creature wing or a piece of food  - how on earth would you set it up so that Studio would render it properly?

    No idea. Works great for inanimate stuff. I'm not particularly impressed with its skin results to start with and only use it as a starting point and do most of the skin work outside of Substance in Photoshop or a similar program. I get the impression it was created initially with hard body in mind, and organics were kind of an afterthought added in later.

     

    * How do you figure out how much Roughness to put on any surface when you can't also adjust the specular strength to check where the reflections are? DAZ characters, especially 8.1 ones, come with a Roughness map and specular values set correctly, but how can you make new ones in Substance Painter if you can't simulate those Dual Lobe values and such?

    If Substance spits out a map, it's designed for a setting of 1 for its render setup and the map controls it. Black is 0, White is 1. YMMV when importing into Daz. The material qualities in Substance are of variable for starters, and their renderer is a little off from iray. Bump/Norm are MUCH stronger in Substance. There are several tutorial products here at Daz that have recommended settings. 

     

    * No height maps for 8.1 characters means that elements of the character's morph are always applied when you load in Normals for surface detail even when using a default G8.1 figure. You can see creases under the nose that shouldn't be there, shaded areas for wrinkles where there are none, etc. I assume these would have to be painted out of the normal maps manually?

    Maps look best designed for the character they are made for. If you don't want features in the map, do your work on a base G8/8.1 instead of a shaped one. That would be fine for creating an MR, but for a character, you really want those details in there.

     

    * 8.1's  AO maps make everything ridiculously dark in Substance Painter if you try applying them to an Ambient Occlusion channel. Has anyone been able to put these to any use, or should you just bake new ones in Substance Painter?

    AO maps for Daz are closer to inverted roughness maps from Substance (though that's not what they are). Taking Daz Iray maps into Substance won't give you the same look as it will in Daz. I use varying combinations of mesh maps to make AO maps for Daz. 

     

    * Is there still REALLY no way to revert a Substance Painter slider to it's default value?

    What sliders? I mean... you can restart substance?

     

    A big issue here is that this really is an artform. Tastes vary greatly and unfortunately there's no "Do this to get this result every time." What you start with plays a factor, what you're going for, etc. Substance has training videos up on their site that I highly recommend you go through. While there are a lot of PAs that use Substance, most don't do the same thing every time. In fact it can vary wildly project to project. And again, I'd recommend the tutorials available at Daz for Substance.

     

  • DiomedeDiomede Posts: 15,388

    Thanks, @ChangelingChick

  • SnowSultanSnowSultan Posts: 3,773

    Thank you for the information. I received a notice that there was going to be a DAZ livestream about using Substance Painter this last weekend, but I never got any further alerts. Maybe it was postponed? Anyway, I did know most of that, but I thought I might be doing something wrong because the results weren't consistant. I guess they're never going to be. Thanks again.

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