Topics

1

Substance Painter - Discussions - MILA Alternative (or not)

 on: February 21, 2017, 09:41:30 pm 

I'm not sure if I set something up wrong or if the documented MILA setup could use some refinement, but I'm definitely getting some oddities with my materials in Maya.  I think the issue stems from the roughness having a gain to 2.0.  Setting the gain to 2.0 would be pushing values of 1 to 2, which I think is outside of the valid range for roughness.  I may have just messed a setting up.  I'm not 100% certain.

To compare I have a network I created this past Spring which I think produces a more accurate result.  It also uses the default albedo, metal, rough maps rather than having to export a reflection and diffuse map.  I based my settings on matching the SP viewport since at the time SP didn't have iray.

Here's a simple script I created which can create my custom network or the documented network. 
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/128578/MILA_SP/ImportTextureSets.py

Place the script in yourDocuments/maya/scripts

inside of maya execute the following python code:
import ImportTextureSets; ImportTextureSets.Run()

OR

To create the allegorithmic network do:
import ImportTextureSets; ImportTextureSets.ALLEGORITHMIC_NETWORK = True; ImportTextureSets.Run()



The script will ask for you to select a folder with your exported textures, then will create the materials.  It assumes your naming convention is $textureSet_mapsuffix.  You must assign the materials to the scene.

Here are test renders of the different outputs.  Once again, I may have just missed something, but as far as I can tell the documented MILA setup doesn't seem to properly capture the overlay of reflections with a 100% black material, nor does the rough look correct with the gain set to 2.0.  Compare the grunge on the bottom of the sphere.

Thoughts?

2

Substance Painter - Technical Support - Particle UI Doesn't refresh properly

 on: December 21, 2015, 11:06:07 pm 

As I've been exploring the particle tools  I've noticed that the UI often fails to properly refresh when switching between emitters and receivers.  For example   if I switch to the RcBurn it will only list TurbulencePower and Scale parameters.  I then select a new emitter and the RcvBurn will properly show its full set of parameters.  Attached is an example of the UI listing no properties for the RcvVein.

3

Substance Painter - Discussions - Perplexed for reasoning behind new shaders in 1.7

 on: December 21, 2015, 04:04:35 pm 

I have to admit I'm a little confused for the reasoning behind adding the custom car paint and cloth shaders to the latest version of SP.  Maybe I'm missing the point of SP, but I'd assume you'd want to use this as part of your asset creation pipeline.  However, when SP's custom shaders already fail to match the look and feel of materials in Max, Maya, and Unity (I have yet to update to version 5.3) what's the point of adding even more custom shaders that won't match the materials of other DCC apps?

I would have been a lot more excited if I saw iray in 1.7.  For some reason I thought that was planned for Painter, but maybe it's just designer?

4

Substance Painter - Feature Requests - Global scale for particle settings

 on: December 15, 2015, 09:06:18 pm 

Right now if I spend the time to create a custom particle brush it can't easily adapt to models of varying sizes.  I'm forced to go to each parameter that has some type of relationship to size and refine all these settings for larger or smaller models.  It would be extremely useful for there to be a global scale param which exists along side the DT settings to apply a scale factor to any parameters which are sensitive to the scale/space of the model.

Example: I create a custom brush to paint on the backside of a eye model.  The particles flow around the model to the front side and creating veins.  Now the modeler gives me the eyeball of a giant that's 5x the size of my previous eye.  I attempt to use my custom particle brush, but the particles don't make it around to the front of the eye due to the scale difference.  If I could set a global scale for the particles to 5.0 then the brush would work as expected.

5

Substance Painter - Technical Support - 1/ior map with iray

 on: September 24, 2015, 10:36:20 pm 

I've been working on getting models to look good in iray and max.  I noticed an issue with the 1/ior maps.  At least with 8-bit maps a 100% metal material exports with a RGB value of 0.  This wrecks havoc with iray since dividing by zero isn't valid.  I have a work around by using the bitmap node's "output" rollout to remap values of 0 to .05.  OOC, what is the IOR of 100% metal in SP?

I also noticed a huge discrepancy between SP's converted glossiness map and how iray treats the value.  I saw there was a glossiness^2 export option.  By going with this idea of ^ I got similar results between SP and iray when I further modified the exported maps to get create a glossiness^4 map.

Bonus comment : Having a # symbol in a filename and attempting to use that as an alpha causes SP to crash (at least in 1.4.2)