For those of us exporting from Substance Painter to Iray...
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,511
in The Commons
Could you tell me in which surface parameters the exported Metallic and Roughness maps should be placed in order to get the same basic results as shown in Substance Painter? Roughness maps seems to work well in the Glossy Layered Weight channel, but I've had all kinds of random results with Metallic ones.
Thanks in advance.
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From what I have read this should not work.. But.. I put the metallic in the base color with the metallicity turned on and it did rendered properly. I've just started working with metalics though so I could be totaly wrong on this one.
That was for a metal surface that had no real Diffuse (albedo) texture though? I'll give that a try with a pure metal texture, but do you have any suggestions for when you have to put a color map in the Diffuse channel and you need the Metallic to help drive the specularity along with the Roughness?
I'd try Metallicity and Glossy Roughness.
Destiny seems to be right, I think my lighting was preventing me from seeing the changes to specularity when I was doing the initial experimenting. I'll do another test from Substance Painter tomorrow and see.
I do not have a Substance Painter, but have Substance Designer.
Any tips for using this to transfer to iray materials?
Also, if you have succeded with creating such materials for iray,
could you possible post some render made with them, please.
Artini: I don't know how to actually use Substance Designer, but it can export PBR textures that should work well in Iray (like albedo maps, metallicity and roughness maps, normals, etc). Designer also seems to like the kinds of maps that are generated when a model is first exported from it's modeler (like curvature and AO), but I don't know how to get those maps from a DAZ model.
Thanks for the tips, SnowSultan.
I will give it a try.
If you look at Allegorithmic's facebook page, the 5.3 version of Substance Designer will have Iray integration then Substance Painter will have it next. Also if you chack their request page, vote for UDIM functionality so they can start working on that in their products. It's already under review, would help to get more votes to push it over the edge.
When engaging Metalicity the Glossness Weight channel is omitted. The limited documentation states black and white strength maps can be use the Metalicity channel but like you have had mixed results.
Great to know, Male-M3dia, thanks for heads up.
* I misread this post... I'm leaving the information here as some might find it valuable but it doesn't actually address the quote from SnowSultan as I was thinking in reverse (Designer creating the map rather then using the maps... which I knew better but am still waking up. ;) .. as to creating them, one would have to import the model into a Content Creation tool like Blender, Maya, etc... and use that to create the maps.
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These maps are often used to create other texture maps rather then directly. For instance, AO and Curvature maps can be used as a base to create a dirt map that fills in crevices.
"Curvature can be used to mask where the surface would get more wear or where sub-surface scattering might occur (convex), where it might accumulate more dirt (concave), to check for surface continuity, etc." from Polycount Forums i.e. the convex map is often used to focus scratch marks, chips/nicks, etc... on a texture.
Another use for these maps is in environments with a compositor. They can be used for post production effects. DAZ Studio does not have a compositor but one could use Photoshop, Gimp, or other 2D editing products that support layers to do some basic compositing with these. This is a bit complex to explain in a post though.
The AO map used to be used to fake AO when the render engine didn't do AO of course, but now not so much since pretty much any modern render engine does now.
Male-Media: that's great news, thanks for that information.
Szark: Hm, that's interesting. I was able to create a complex surface using a mask in the Metallicity channel and end up with some areas being shiny and others less so, but it took a lot of experimentation. But in general, are those the correct locations when a texture does require both Metallicity and Roughness masks?
Gedd: Yeah I watched a lot of Substance Painter tutorials and they were always using those maps to create dirt and other edge effects. I'm still curious as to how we would get those from a purchased product though?...would they need to be exported out of Studio into a good modeler and then exported again with the generated maps?
Yes I would say so as the rouhgness controls how shiney and reflective the metalic and non metalic surfaces are. So they work together IMO. There is some debate over roughness masks weather black is more roghness and white less but in my experience it is the reverse. So black is more shiney, less roughness and white less shiney, more roughness. This is how it should work. I haven't had time to really test this though, to make 100% sure.
That seems to be correct, at least as far as how they work in DAZ Studio. I did have to invert a couple of masks from Substance Painter to get the expected results though, so maybe it thinks black=more? Again, still experimenting.
Normally I put the metallicity map in the metallicity channel, and the roughness map in the glossy roughness channel (and sometimes also in the diffuse roughness channel).
Don't forget also to turn those sliders up to almost 100% when you apply the maps. The black and white maps set a 0-100% value based on the current slider position. So 100% of 0 is still 0. Although I have found out through tinkering around with sliders that if you take the Glossy Reflectivity, Glossy Roughness, and Metallicity sliders all the way to 100, they seem to behave weirdly with maps. For instance, with the lightsaber I posted in Freebies the other day, I had to take the metallicity to like 99% instead of 100% otherwise it just looked like plain chrome with no apparent variation in values for reflectivity or roughness. Also, a 100% metallicity value overrides the diffuse channel.
Start off by making sure the "Base Mixing" is set to 'PBR Metallicity Roughness'.
Metalic map placed in the "Metallicity" tab set to 1
Base map placed in the "Base Color" tap set to 1
Roughness map placed in the "Diffuse Roughness" tab set to 1
Normal map in the "Normal" tab set to 1
This should give you a good base in Iray surfaces to start off with.
You're sure it works that way, setting them to 1? I would think the black-white gradient would work off the base setting, requiring 100 or close to it to get the full effect.
Yeah Dz's way is pretty much how I do it too, I just wasn't sure about the Metallicity map because I was using a light setup that didn't show the variations in the specularity well.
One thing I haven't quite figured out yet is how to edit the export settings in Substance Painter. I can't drag or edit any of the channels, and my normals are always coming out as DirectX, even when I set them as OpenGL in the initial setup. I wish we could get a preset of some kind for Studio/Iray users.
Both Painter and designer can bake maps for you.
Here's an exporter I made for DAZ Iray: https://www.mediafire.com/?7k5hbdktn0l9m9o
Unzip, and drop int :Substance Painter:shelf:allegorithmic:export-presets
This will export the following:
BaseColor
Roughness
Matallic
Normal
Diffuse
Glossiness
That should be really helpful Dz, thank you very much.
Nice! Thanks a lot!
Thank you Dz
Hey, Dz, thanks so much.
The 5.3 version of Substance Designer is out with Iray integration in aux viewport and mdl export:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLNd1PKCTe0
Just wanted to run this by DzFire and anyone else familiar with maps created in Substance Painter to check if it sounds right to you. I used Dz's exporter settings and ended up with two basic specularity maps (the Glossiness one and the inverted Roughness one).
- I put the Glossiness map (mostly black with white where there should be specularity) in the Glossy Reflectivity set at 1.00
- The Roughness map (mostly white with black where there should be specularity) in the Glossy Roughness at 1.00.
- Glossy Layered Weight at 1.00
For me, this rendered highlights and reflections very similar to what was being previewed in Substance Painter. Does this sort of setup work for you too or do you put the maps in different locations?
Thanks in advance.
Thank you all for the help! But still ... There is almost endless possibilities where to put the maps ... At least, for the beginners ... And I am a beginner xd
Sooo, I'm sure I put the Metallicity, Normal and Base Color maps into the right place, but ... There is Diffuse weight, diffuse roughness and diffuse strength... Where to put the Diffuse map? There are also more roughness and glossiness labeled... And what to do with the RGB Alpha?
Dz, could you explain why both a Base Color and a Diffuse map need to be generated? Sometimes there are texture elements on one and not the other, but we only have the one parameter in which to put that sort of texture (Diffuse). What do we do when this happens?
As far as I can make out PBR Base Colour is an Albedo diffuse map, meaning no light info is on the texture like shadows and highlight etc so I am not sure why DZ's tool exports both.
As for Gloss Map I presumed it went into the Gloss Wieght channel and not the reflection channel. Everything esle sounds right.