Hello everyone, it's beena while since I've been on here and just thought I'd check to see how the engine was coming along. I've been busy this last year working on some models for a VR game I'm going to be developing and bought myself the Indie Substance Pack from Allegorithmic because I'm going to be using the Unreal Engine for my game and because they had a sale on so I got Substance Painter, Substance Designer and Bitmap2Materials for $199. Bargain!

I've just seen from one of the updates that the graphics are getting an overhaul so that we can use PBR textures and I was thinking of doing some textures for the Store on here to earn myself a few quid.

Here's one that I started to prepare earlier (lol) for a storage crate model for my game so you can see what sort of textures are possible with the Substance suite of programs:



So if I'm remembering correctly the current textures in Game Guru need a Diffuse, Normal and Specular map..? If I do manage to do some for the Store here I'll make sure I include textures that will have the traditional maps plus roughness, ambient occlusion, metallic etc so people can go PBR if they want.

I'm going to be busy learning how to use these programs so I thought I might as well do an urban texture pack or maybe a sci-fi texture pack for here whilst I'm working out how to do stuff.

Any feedback on both my model and my texture above would be much appreciated!

Be nice to see something new texture wise,the.gg beta has just gone into testing so it shouldn't be to long before we can use pbr.your model looks good,I gave up substance as you have to use Ps.but I have quixil suit so I will try that.hopr to see some examples from you soon.

(Sorry rambling a bit there )

Dave

I bought that same suite a couple years back ( Substance Painter, Substance Designer and Bitmap2Material) . Substance is awesome, though takes some learning to design. (I still don't quite get it beyond a few nodes). B2M will be very useful in GG though, since it will export all the maps as opposed to one compact file like the substance file. Unless, of course, Lee makes substances a feature of the engine. That would be way down on the voting list, I'm sure! On that note, I'm looking forward to what you come up with!

There is a little more to it then simply plopping down a texture on an entity and your done.Definitely need to start off with the model, you can do a hires model with all the details and such and bake that to create a basic AO map, which you can then convert to a normal map.Some instances you can go right ahead and create a normal for the model

I would start of with creating a colour ID map and detailed normal, after which you can work you way from there, definitely need to do a bit more if you have any intention of selling on the store.

https://www.tgcstore.net/product/29475
Take this for example , all of it was done with normals first, it has grime and dust on it, bolts, and edge joints, took a better part of 6 months to come to grips with texture painting app and normals, you just got the software I would hold off any ambitions of selling on the store until such time you have gained some experience especially with painting normals as that is the single biggest advantage you can gain with any low poly model is learning to paint normals, it is also the reason I skipped on substance painter, and went with photoshop and plugins, far, far more control and can paint normals in the same software suite, photoshop just handles miles better then substance, to be honest substance painter can be unstable at times as well.

Definitely keep at it, will take a decent while to get to grips with it.

@. wizard of id
You're right there,I got hold of the quixill team and after a few emails I got a licence for the old Ndo2 program.great for painting normals and not clutterd up with all the extra bits .

Dave

I doubt that would even appear on the voting list, it's a licensed format, so TGC wold probably have to pay to include it in GG

You should still be able to use pbr,this is what Lee said in a post



Dave

Yup, it was that post that prompted this thread!

@Granada,

Just to clarify: You don't need PS for Substance, it is a standalone application, but Quixel does require PS to run it. The other thing to be ware of is Subsatnce is OK with less ram, but Quixel requires at least 16GB if you want to use NDO.

At least that has been my experience....

Reliquia....

@reliquia

8 gig is more then enough, the ram usage scales with texture size, additionally if you do the effort of merging completed layers and zipping up in NDO, ram usage barely goes above 500mb per PS document.While quixel it self uses a fair amount of base memory, there is honestly no need for 16 gig ram, if you work smart and have a clean work flow.

@granada
Just to clarify, I wasn't talking about pbr, we will get that, I was talking about the mention of maybe being able to import substance files, pbr is a standard texture format, but substance files are kind of an intelligent brush texture format used in substance painter etc and might need a licence to be used in a commercial software

@wizard of id,

I would have thought that as well.

On my system NDO will load but the UI becomes almost unusable.

When I use Quixel Suite I never have anything else running in PS. Since I have yet to get more ram, I can't use NDO atm, even if I set the size of the maps to 2048.

I asked Quixel support about that and they said try adding more ram (16gig) to my system.

Reliquia....

Hi guys I was talking about Ndo2,not part of quixill suit.its a old software from them for painting normals .

https://quixel.se/nDo2/nDo2_workflow.pdf

This is interesting to




Dave

Some thing is up with your system in that case, possibly the CPU been a bit weak, I have had the odd crash, but that was with working with over 50 odd layers

With most pbr software you have got to learn how to make
colour maps or you will be lost in the process,

I just colour the parts in the modelling software export,open in UU uv map and save out uv map using the repaint option .

http://www.unwrap3d.com/u3d/tutorial_texture_atlas.aspx

Dave

The common method for readying a model to use in a PBR painter like substance painter is to take each area that is meant to be a different texture and vertex paint them a different colour (slightly different to just giving them different materials and textures), that way in the PBR painter they can be used as masks (called an ID map in substance painter), so you don't have to worry about going over the edges.

On a basic level all you need to do is unwrap the model neatly and export it in a format the painter will accept, but doing only that will mean you can't mask each texture are and you have to have a steady hand to paint inside the edges.

Also, some people try to save space on a texture by UV unwrapping a model so that UV's that use the same texture overlap, but if you are using something like substance painter to add detail that can cause issues, for example what you paint on one side of a model may also be painted on the other side. When using a UV painting program it's always best to make sure every face has its own space on the UV to avoid overlap issues when painting.

That's exactly what I said but a shorter version .

Dave

While a colour ID maps makes it easier to paint, it also allows for masks especially dirt masks as well as dealing with layer transparency as well as creating illumination maps, it is the simplest part of the maps needed. Normals and ambient occlusion maps are far, far more important as those two maps can paint specialty masks across the entire texture space ignoring the colour ID map, and allows adding actual depth to a texture by adding shadows to a model that is reliant on a normal map for example, it also allows adding dirt masks to edges as well as any normal map information with regards to any thing not flat on it.

If you create the normal map in photoshop for example, you can create a colour id map based on the normal map layers, photoshop also allows creating a colour id on the fly while painting texturing by creating a mask layer, which in my opinion makes photoshop far more powerful then any thing substance painter can do, you will likely still end up having to use photoshop from some mask painting.

One thing i love about substance painter is how easy it is to use a high poly model to paint detail onto a low poly model, it's just a matter of loading the low poly model as the main project, then loading the high poly model into the bake settings and it automatically bakes the normal and AO maps from the high poly model to the low poly model. With colour ID maps included in the high poly model you can paint the individual details. The only issue really with SP is that if you decide you want extra detail you haven't included in the high poly model, then it's tricky to paint it on, it can be done, but as WoD said it's easier to do in photoshop.

You can also do this to free in xnormal,for those who can't afford other programmes .

http://www.xnormal.net/Tutorials.aspx

Dave

Interesting, can you use XNormal to paint texture on your models? or is it just for baking default maps like normal and AO etc?

Looking at various tutorials i've seen on it you need to paint the textures in something like zbrush or substance, then XNormal is used for baking the normals, ao, etc. Thing i don't understand is, if you're using zbrush or substance painter to paint the textures in the first place then you won't need XNormal because they both bake out normals and AO etc themselves, seems a little redundant, or am i missing something?

This is a tool for baking ,it can do a lot of other things also.a lot of professional people use this one for baking as it's developed for this in mind .



It's free as I said for people wanting to bake these maps that can't afford the other tools.


Dave

Sounds a bit redundant to me, almost all 3d modellers, and 3d painters have baking built in, you can export normal and ao maps using blender for example, and GIMP can generate a decent normal map too.

A lot of people will still texture by hand
Without the fancy new tools.

Dave

I use Xnormal have been for a while it is very good and yes it bakes which is useful if you use Sketchup like me

The best thing about Substance Painter and Substance Designer is how much TIME it saves you. Once you know what you're doing you can create great looking textures in as little as a few minutes using Smart Materials. I'm not at that stage yet though, although I have created a Smart Material for my crates (because I got the small crate done the way I wanted it to look but COMPLETELY forgot how I did it so I HAD to create a Smart Material from it so that I could add it to my medium and large crates lol).

Once you have a few to show you will have to start a new thread. (This one got set of hijact ,sorry ).

Dave

and it creates much better AO maps than Blender imo.

Relquia....