Adobe Standard Material and IRAY?

[Patrick Traile]

Hi all, Adobe standard material not working out well for me with Iray in substance or painter; Once I switch to PBR metalic rough everything is good. I completely lose ambient occlusion for instance with the ASM. Is that these materials are not completely compatible with Iray or am i doing something wrong? 

[Luca Giarrizzo · Accepted solution]

Hello Patrick,

The Iray implementation of the Adobe Standard Material does not use the ambient occlusion map by design.

Please note the ambient occlusion natively computed by Iray's path tracer is physically accurate, and should not require an additional texture. In that sense, the Adobe Standard Material shader is 'correct' in ignoring the ambient occlusion texture. That being said, we agree it is confusing that there is an available slot for a texture which ends up being ignored.

We will add an Intensity parameter to the Ambient occlusion group for the Adobe Standard Material shader in Iray. This parameter will control how much of the ambient occlusion texture should be added to the ambient occlusion computed by the Iray renderer. The default value for this parameter will be 0, which will make it clearer why the texture is 'ignored' by default as well as provide more control to the user.

Best regards.

PS: Please note this section of the forum is dedicated to Substance 3D Designer. I am happy to help regardless, and your questions cover concepts which apply to both Designer and Painter. If you have questions about issues or concepts which are specific to Painter, I suggest posting in the section dedicated to Substance 3D Painter.

[Patrick Traile]

Hi Luca, yeah I though this would be useful for people using both softwares, next time I'll be sure to use only one forum which makes more sense. One thing about the AO with ASM though is that when in OpenGL mode it does display the AO is if it's using the ; Is this so? And yeah, would be great to have a way to dial in that AO in Iray for a little more control. Thanks again Luca.

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Indeed, the OpenGL renderer makes full use of the ambient occlusion map, as it only uses rasterisation and thus needs a texture to render detailed ambient occlusion. Common ambient occlusion techniques for rasterisation include screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) and horizon-based ambient occlusion (HBAO) which the texture is meant to complement gracefully.

Rasterisation is still a key part of smooth real-time rendering, but technology moves fast!

In Designer, we recently added the RTAO node which is an implementation of ray-traced ambient occlusion and should provide more natural and physically accurate results than the HBAO node. Best of both worlds!

I am glad this was informative, have fun with the Substance 3D tools!