Can 3D View preview a combined Metallic + roughness output?

[dgoyette]

I've always created Substances that have a single output node for each type of output (base color, ao, metallic, roughness, etc). But what if I create a combined output, where metallic goes in the "r" channel, ao goes in the "g" channel, etc. The 3D view doesn't seem to show a correct preview when I do this.

Is there a way to get the 3D View to pull individual channels of a texture? I've already tried adding multiple "usaged" to my combined texture, but 3D view doesn't seem to pick it up. For example, in this attached screenshot, why doesn't the 3D view use the "r" channel of this output for metallic?

[Vincent Gault]

hey, the 3d view is driven by a shader, which is expecting a specific set of textures: it does not dynamically adapt to what you specify in the output usages (especially for per channel data. This can still be useful when used in another software where shaders would be defined the way you want.

[dgoyette]

Thanks for clearing that up. Is there any documentation on the site for making my own 3D view shader, so that I can align the 3D view with my workflow?

[Cyrille Damez]

We don't have a lot of specific documentation for programming shaders in Designer as we use standard GLSL shaders. Only the .glslfx files which specifies the parameter and textures bindings are specific to Substance Designer (see this documentation page : https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/sddoc/glslfx-shaders-102400055.html)

However, unless you already are proficient with shader programming,  I would rather recommend you keep both separated outputs and merged outputs on your graph, rather than try to create modified shaders for Substance Designer's viewport. You can simply enable the separated outputs when working in Designer, and disable them / enable the merged outputs when exporting the sbsars for use in Unity. You can also just create a "utility" graph designed to convert from unmerged to merged  and just add that graph when you are ready to export to Unity.