Participant

SD mats are flat in SP

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
May 28, 2022
4 replies
897 views

Hi there

Sorry to be a pain.

I'm using a Mac m1 and I made a mat in SD and sent it to SP through SD.

The mat is showing flat in SP and Blender, I have tried some workarounds like adding in a normal invert node but nothing is working.

SD is also defaulting to Direct X normals in the properties and normal node everytime I change graph, and the height scale and tessolation also reset.

Does anyone have a method to get a mat from SD to SP and Blender?

Thank you.

F

forty8Author

Participant

Hi Dave

You are a legend, thank you very much for your time and you clear logical answers, it's very much apriciated.

I think it's time for some trial and error!

Have a good day bro.

Forty8

davescm

Community Expert

"I sent it to SP, it looks nice but if you look at an angle it is completed flat"

There are two ways of using height information. One is bump. This does not actually displace the surface but creates the illusion of height on a surface when rendering by getting the shader to render as if the surface had some 'height'. Different shaders can use the information in different ways and there is usually some control over that depth. Although simulated, it can look quite effective until you look at the edge of a model against the background. Because the surface is not actually raised then that edge still is, and still looks, flat.

Normal maps work in a similar way except that the shading can simulate movement in three directions. The same limitations on edges apply though, the model has not really been displaced it is all shading trickery.

A height map can be used to drive real displacement. In this case the surface of a model is moved in 3D space and edges therefore take on that movement when viewed against the background. This disadvantage is that the surface must be divided into small enough surface units to create that movement, which means a lot more vertices in the model. This can cause a great load on the computational requirements (and memory requirements) of rendering.

So it is a choice between few vertices and simulated surface displacement or lots of vertices and real surface displacement. Each has an advantage in different situations.

In Painter go to the shader settings and adjust the displacement scale and tessellation settings to view with real displacement as opposed to bump

Dave

F

forty8Author

Participant

Hi Davescm

Thank you, this was a really comprehensive answer and really apriciate the time you took to write this my questions was answered completley.

You seem really knoweldgable so if I could ask one more thing it would really help becuase it has boggled my mind so far.

Lets say I create a fabric matrial or an extruded pattern on a wall and in SD I can clearly see the height, when I send the matiral over to SP it shows as a flat texture with what seems like no height information, however, If I import the same matrial to substance sampler it shows height infromation.

Am I just an idiot or am I doing something wrong? Or am I possibly confusing that hieght information wont show in SP and only for render engines?

I tried to include some pictures to show what I mean.

I tried to make a basic pattern

I sent it to SP, it looks nice but if you look at an angle it is completley flat.

I sent it to Sampler and it is showing the height, also red for some reason(shrug)

davescm

Community Expert

Hi

To go from Substance Designer to Substance Painter the best way is to publish the material as sbsar and then you can use it in Substance Painter as with any other material.

To go direct from Substance Designer to Blender you have two choices.

1. Export your maps and import them into Blender plugging each into the principled shader except height which you can plug via a displacement node into the material output. Choose your normal format in the Normal node and right click on the graph in the Explorer panel to choose Export outputs as bitmaps

or

2. Install the Substance 3D plug in for Blender. Then you can directly access the published sbsar materials and have control over their parameters in Blender.

https://substance3d.adobe.com/plugins/substance-in-blender/

If instead of going direct, you use Substance Painter to place materials on a model then you can set an export preset to generate the correct maps. Then using Blender's Node Wrangler plug in a simple Ctrl+T will load each map to the correct slot. Example preset below - note that it uses the Normal OpenGL output not the default normal

Once in Blender the normal maps from either of those three routes should work OK. Height is set to bump as default. You can get real displacement by either

a. Plugging the heightmap into a displacement modifier

or

b. If using the Cycles render engine, setting material to Displacement Only and adjusting the strength in the displacement node.

Either of those displacement methods require the model surface to be sufficiently subdivided. You can use real subdivision, add a modifier or turn on 'Experimental' in render settings and then use adaptive sub-division, in the subdivision surface modifier to achieve higher subdivision closer to the render camera.

Dave

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