More frustrations with SD4 - SD5 with no docs. Material Blend Node (w img)

[reidbaker]

Trying to learn Substance Designer with my new SD5, but the tutorial videos existing are for 4... With a lack of documentation, it's been frustrating when I come across discrepancies that are eating up time since I can't find information anywhere. Right now I'm having a display issue with the Material Color Blend node in SD5. Has this changed from 4 to 5? It looks like the issue lies with the difference in diffuse vs base color inputs and outputs.

In the 2D viewer it will display the diffuse channel, but that's not a typical output for the PBR textures, and the node now has both. So when you do the connection, it will properly connect to the basecolor node, but I have to duplicate it and assign it to a diffuse out in order to get it to display in the material blend node.... Meanwhile, the tutorial video only has the diffuse channel.

This is the type of stuff that REQUIRES documentation that's not currently available, and it's because it's the small details when you're trying to learn that cost a huge a mount of time in researching and trying to figure it out.

[Malo]

Thats the way how Substance Designer works now.
They make the new BaseColor input to have a difference between Metal/Rough and Glossy/Spec workflow.

To get rid of that problem you have to disable or enable the chanels in the Nodes befor you connect them.
If you have Custom Nodes, you have to rebuild it or connect it manually.

I dont like that too, but thats how it works now.

[reidbaker]

And that's the type of thing that is hard to really understand when moving between versions since it's so so poorly documented.

I'm now noticing that with the material color blend node that it's not impacting the normal map at all... sigh

[Nicolas LIATTI]

Hi,

If you want to avoid any problems, you should use the Material mode or Compact Material mode of the graph (shortcut 2 & 3), which will link everything automatically. All the materials in the library are already compatible with the base color, so using them should work straight forward.

And if you create your own materials, this all depends on your shader. The output usage are simple conventions, you can use whatever you want for your materials. And you can as well modify the source of the Material Blend if you want to remove the base color (or copy the graph and create your own Material Blend without the base color). This all depends on your needs.

Nico

[reidbaker]

Hi,

If you want to avoid any problems, you should use the Material mode or Compact Material mode of the graph (shortcut 2 & 3), which will link everything automatically. All the materials in the library are already compatible with the base color, so using them should work straight forward.

And if you create your own materials, this all depends on your shader. The output usage are simple conventions, you can use whatever you want for your materials. And you can as well modify the source of the Material Blend if you want to remove the base color (or copy the graph and create your own Material Blend without the base color). This all depends on your needs.

Nico

To complete the tutorials, it requires using the different levels of display. In fact I started with the compact view and couldn't get things to display properly until after playing with the Diffuse channel specifically - a difference between the video and what I was experiencing (and I showed an image). I hunted around for what was going on (trying different nodes and even deleting and replacing over and over). I do think there are bugs with your material blend node that are causing some unusual behaviors - as noted by the other topic of the normal map not working either. That's a critical node and would be worth looking into.

THanks.

[Wes McDermott]

Hi,

If you want to avoid any problems, you should use the Material mode or Compact Material mode of the graph (shortcut 2 & 3), which will link everything automatically. All the materials in the library are already compatible with the base color, so using them should work straight forward.

And if you create your own materials, this all depends on your shader. The output usage are simple conventions, you can use whatever you want for your materials. And you can as well modify the source of the Material Blend if you want to remove the base color (or copy the graph and create your own Material Blend without the base color). This all depends on your needs.

Nico

To complete the tutorials, it requires using the different levels of display. In fact I started with the compact view and couldn't get things to display properly until after playing with the Diffuse channel specifically - a difference between the video and what I was experiencing (and I showed an image). I hunted around for what was going on (trying different nodes and even deleting and replacing over and over). I do think there are bugs with your material blend node that are causing some unusual behaviors - as noted by the other topic of the normal map not working either. That's a critical node and would be worth looking into.

THanks.

Hi,

This discrepancy actually appeared in SD4. Near the end of the version 4.x cycle, we changed the Diffuse to be Base Color when working with PBR Metal/Rough workflow. The reason was to adhere to standards. We also support Spec/Gloss PBR which does use Diffuse, so we needed to differentiate these output maps as they actually contain different data.

It's not correct and confusing to use metal/rough workflow with diffuse as the output. The correct output should be base color, but at the time of the tutorials, we only had diffuse. I'm sorry for this confusion. Using older nodes with Diffuse as the only output will not connect correctly with base color nodes in compact material mode. You need to hit 1 on the keyboard to go to standard mode and manually place diffuse into base color. The maps in the tutorial are authored correctly (for base color), but they are labeled incorrectly.

Cheers,

Wes