A square mesh in Alchemist, a rectangular mesh in Maya

[MaximilianS]

i enjoy alchemist, and as a maya teacher/tutor, i help my audience to use the tool and integrate it into maya.

my question is basic and applies to all 3D apps: when in alchemist i usually work with the flat square mesh because later on i transfer the material to a flat surface in maya. since that surface has different dimensions, it's always a surprise what i render in arnold.

typical workflow: i start with a 16:9 photo, load it into alchemist, enrich it with several layers, export it as sbsar, import it into maya's hypershader, apply it to a 16:9 plane. since the 16:9 photo is massively squeezed in alchemist, AND the applied layers seem to work in dimensions of a square (the cobblestone pattern does not know that my image is 16:9), i would like to know what i'm doing wrong, what i might have overlooked?

best,

----maximilian

[Baptiste M]

Hello Maximilian,

Substance Alchemist can export only squared textures.
To avoid the squeezing effect, you can do the following:
- Drag and drop your image
- Choose "Use as bitmap"
- Add the crop filter and here you have a parameter "Image size" where you can input the dimensions of your input image. This will prevent to squeeze your input image and then your material.

I hope it helps you. Don't hesitate if you have any questions.

[Pegot]

Substance Alchemist can export only squared textures.

Are there plans to fix this and allow custom output sizes?  I'm currently trying to generate height and secular maps for some large NASA World Equirectangular panoramic images.  But it seems I can't use Alchemist for that task.

[Naëlle]

Alchemist relies heavily on the substance technology.  Many filters are sbsar files authored in Designer, so we can provide at most what designer provides.  For now that means only images with height and width of power-of-two.  Designer can work with rectangular power-of-two textures, but that's a very specific case we're not managing for the moment.  Neither designer nor Alchemist can use an arbitrary rectangular format.