Messages

1

Substance Designer - Discussions - Re: $time variable

 on: January 07, 2019, 07:52:38 pm 

Is the $time playable in Unreal like in Unity?

2

Substance Integrations - UE4 - Unreal Engine Hair Shader Tutorial w/ Procedural Hair Substance Material

 on: January 06, 2019, 06:54:59 pm 

Hello all I wanted to share an Unreal Engine Hair Shader tutorial PLAYLIST I made.  It uses an HDA I made for Houdini for procedural hair cards with a procedural Hair Substance Designer material, on Gumroad at https://gum.co/xqwnQ , however, it should still be good if you're not using those as it goes over all the inputs of the shader and what you need.

It's six parts / 80 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DCzu7-MuA8&list=PLQNO-lnTk0ux0PlUhxEfegKdrbDs7L8Ge

3

Contests Archive - 2019 - X-TAON: The Art Car Texturing Contest - Carcade - XTaon Entry

 on: December 19, 2018, 02:18:46 pm 

Partially finished but had to submit it literally minutes before the deadline.  Substance kept crashing on me, especially with rendering after upgrading to the latest version that just came out.

4

Substance Designer - Showcase - Procedural Hair Cards with Substance and Houdini

 on: August 16, 2018, 12:25:58 am 

Made a Procedural Hair Card Kit with Houdini (HDA) and a custom built Substance Material to go along with it. 

The Substance Material includes comb map data along with obvious hair styling options and even a texture atlas with procedural edge feathering. 



Or check it out on Gumroad:

https://gumroad.com/products/xqwnQ/edit

Or on ArtStation:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XmvkD

5

Substance Designer - Discussions - Increase Luminosity with Color

 on: July 09, 2018, 07:20:14 am 

Hello all,  I'm doing an iteration node in an FX Map and want to increase the brightness progressively with each iteration. 

In greyscale it works fine by doing $number / iterationcount in the luminosity function.  However I need a clean alpha as the edges of my pattern need to be blurred/beveled, so that poses a problem so I move onto color scale to feed in a clean alpha before beveling etc.

But in the color node, I can't get it to progressively get lighter, it mixes to where you have dark objects on top of light ones, not good for a height map. 

I tried $number / iterationcount and plugged that into the rgb values with an alpha at 1 and set the float 4 as the output.  Why won't it work the same as the grayscale where it did progressively get lighter

FYI I need a clean alpha per shape so I can't just grab the final alpha after everything is compiled by the FX map. 

6

Substance Designer - Showcase - Procedural Hair Card Asset with Substance Designer and Houdini

 on: November 07, 2017, 12:50:06 pm 

Hello all, 

I wanted to share a Houdini OTL asset I've made and am testing out for the beta release.  It also needs Substance Designer.  The FREE VERSION OF HOUDINI (Apprentice) works FINE with this and the hair system isn't too hard to learn in 20 minutes. 

"https://www.psynema.com/houdini-procedural-hair-cards-game-meshes/"

The link above is the documentation and download links (available on Orbolt)

The asset takes Houdini's Hair system, then procedurally makes a low poly hair card for each hair clump, so your hair generate nodes will need a hairclump node within to initialize a clumpid attribute.  Simply plug your hair generate node into the asset and the left output will give you a low poly hair card wig and the right output gives you a high poly mesh that's exportable.  (Houdini's hair system is actually NOT geometry that's exportable to other software, so the asset takes care of converting it).  

MORE IMPORTANTLY - the asset procedurally creates a GROUP NAME for each hair card that MATCHES its high poly hair clump.  That's important because Substance Designer can take that information and BAKE EACH HAIR CARD SEPARATELY without interference from other hairs belonging to other cards, something Houdini has yet to implement, a "match by mesh name" feature.  

Let me know what you all think as I'd like to build upon the asset.  Apologies if this seems off topic due to Houdini, but it does require Substance Designer and its awesome "Bake Opacity Map" feature which Painter oddly doesn't have nor do a lot of 3d packages.  So a nice use for an underused feature. 

Thanks, 

​​​​​​​Gary

7

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: ReImporting Mesh Errors

 on: August 08, 2017, 01:37:07 am 

That's exactly what I mean, when I import the new mesh and apply the exploded materials, in a NEW SCENE and IN EXTERNAL PROGRAMS ASIDE from substance...it's out of synch and messed up and I have no clue why as the UVs are both identical. 

Houdini recognizes the new model and displays appropriately.  No clue why this is happening...argh. 

8

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: ReImporting Mesh Errors

 on: August 04, 2017, 09:30:51 pm 

Tried that doesn't work oddly enough as it still going by projection even after exporting. 

9

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: ReImporting Mesh Errors

 on: August 03, 2017, 10:44:06 pm 

Thanks - confusing as I've done it before sans problem. 

Really don't understand why it won't work when I flatten the textures given the UVs are the same as well but displays the textures just fine for a brief period of time before reloading...there's no way to get the info from UVs only?  I see the model is fine right after reimporting but then the red loading bar starts up then it goes astray....I'll avoid Painter I suppose as I'd have to see inside certain hard to reach crevices etc. 

But is there really no way to get it out of painter as is and onto the collapsed model?  It displays fine in Houdini but I don't understand why it won't display the textures AFTER EXPORTING THEM given the UVs are flat and not projected post exporting.  Marmoset and sketchfab were displaying them improperly but Houdini displays them fine...I'm so confused why the UVs aren't good enough AFTER exporting.  I mean models move and change parts all the time and the last time this happened to me Sketchfab and Blender displayed the textures after exporting just fine after I changed the topology.  Je ne comprend pas

10

Substance Painter - Discussions - ReImporting Mesh Errors

 on: August 02, 2017, 06:14:11 pm 

HELP I've exploded a mesh of an oven for baking and so I can see the inside while I paint. I then switched it out to a collapsed model to paint more details but now my texture isn't synching with the model and the UVs are exactly the same.
Further infuriating as it's completely fine in Houdini - the textures display just fine in exploded and collapsed modes. Substance seems like it's pulling a new UV layout from out of nowhere.

I've heard the pivot/bounding box are issues but tried having the same pivot and no effect and I've done this before in Painter - ie changing topology, exploding then collapsing meshes, sans problem.

REALLY EXTRA INFURIATING - when I switch from exploded to collapsed version of the model, it displays PERFECTLY....then the red loading bar happens...then it goes to hell.

WTF is going on? I've had this issue before with Blender and never figured it out - also modelling an oven...WTF.
Anyone have any ideas? Is substance painter ignoring the UV layout and doing some odd projection of sorts?

11

Substance Integrations - Houdini - Houdini to Substance Painter and Mesh Names

 on: July 30, 2017, 02:24:30 pm 

Had a few questions…

I keep exporting FBX files to Substance Painter but it can never read the vertex colors. Anyone have any idea what's going on or any thing people generally miss? I have the FBX settings on default unless I'm supposed to change something but experimenting with all sorts of changes yields no vertex colors.

Also how do you get Substance Painter to recognize the different mesh names? I've tried group names matching with _high and _low suffixes to isolate baking to mesh parts as well as attribute primitive strings with the name of the mesh with the suffix…and Painter can't read the parts independently of one another and feels like I'm forced to explode the mesh to bake. I hope the only way isn't to have EVERY PART at the object level as that's not practical. The mesh in question I want on ONE texture sheet so no I do not want a separate material index for each single part in case anyone suggests that

As for baking internally I've tried the gameshelf baker and pointed it to my high and low mesh … it exports 256 by 256 black tiles no matter what I do despite the resolution being set to typical 2048, 4096 etc.

Thanks.

12

Substance Integrations - Houdini - Re: Substance Houdini Engine to Unreal

 on: May 30, 2017, 05:46:04 pm 

So the textures would need to be flattened - ie pre exported to basecolor, normal, ao etc. tiffs/jpgs?  I'm confused because I remember seeing a presentation where an SBSAR for a bloody sword was built into the parameter system for a game...unless Unity can do it and Unreal can't? 

Ok thanks.

This is the sword demo on the Houdini site? I think they may have the ability using Unity. Talking with out devs, this was something Houdini did on their end with Unity. I am trying to get more information.

Cheers,
Wes

I was referring to this.  I was under the assumption that an Sbsar could be assigned in Houdini, assign desired parameters in the OTL, then import to a game engine with materials all set up.  Usually OTLs in Houdini come with materials already handled by Houdini. 

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Substance Integrations - Houdini - Re: Substance Houdini Engine to Unreal

 on: May 30, 2017, 05:10:12 pm 

So the textures would need to be flattened - ie pre exported to basecolor, normal, ao etc. tiffs/jpgs?  I'm confused because I remember seeing a presentation where an SBSAR for a bloody sword was built into the parameter system for a game...unless Unity can do it and Unreal can't? 

Ok thanks.

14

Substance Integrations - Houdini - Substance Houdini Engine to Unreal

 on: May 28, 2017, 06:30:37 pm 

Anyone know how to embed a substance into an OTL? I know it can be done and be able to use the parameters of the Substance within an HDA in Unreal, but can't figure out WTF to do and no help in the documentation.

1.  I import the substances into a shop net inside the HDA graph
2.  Add materials via material nodes in Houdini
3.  Add unreal_material with paths to the materials - trying both channels and actual hard paths - ie paths to the substance file itself AND Material'Game/HoudiniEngine/Temp/Material.Material' do not work for me. 
4.  Add the Substance files to the operator type graph...
Nada, just two blank materials imported. 

Houdini 16.0.600, Unreal 4.15 and the latest Houdini 16.0.620 with Unreal 4.16 both same issues

Anyone know how the embedding works?  I don't want to set up materials from scratch as I do want my Houdini files to render outside of UE4 as well, so hence, why I want to embed them vs. re doing it in Unreal.