Why is the color of my material so much darker in 3ds Max than in SD?

[berylsky]

Hello,

Thanks in advance for any help with this matter where the colors are much darker in 3ds Max Redshift material than they are in Substance Designer.  Please note I used both Substance Player and Substance Designer to export bitmaps.

Please see attached and let me know if there is some setting I can use in 3ds Max to correct this?

In the past this happened before using Mental Ray material, so I am guessing this could be the same problem?

Thanks!

[davidarbor]

Are you working in ACES in Redshift and sRGB in Substance Designer? I'm just starting to learn Designer, but I'm also using ACES in Redshift for C4D and changed Designer's Projects > Color Management setting from "Legacy" to "OpenColorIO" and "ACES 1.2." This made my OpenGL view much more contrasty, just like working with ACES in Redshift, so perhaps that's something to check.

In addition to that, I imagine the lighting and environment settings in Designer aren't the same as what you have in 3ds Max, but even so, you're seeing a huge difference, which is why my first thought is color management.

[berylsky]

Hi David,

Thank you for your quick response!  I tried a few different settings and the material is better and still dark.

I am not sure which way is the best to match to Substance with 3ds Max to get it as close as possible?

Please see attached and recommend which would be closes to Substance Designer settings?

In addition, what about my existing library?  Once I switch the color space in color management all of my existing materials got very chromatic.  How am I supposed to mix old with new now?

Thanks!

[davidarbor · Accepted solution]

I don't know 3ds Max, but I would think you would need to disable color management to match the current behavior of Designer, or change your designer settings to use ACES. I use ACEScg in Redshift and that's what I set Designer to, but it's probably best to figure out what the actual problem is before you work on how to match your existing library. Or maybe the solution is as simple as what Dave said below.

[berylsky]

Hi David,

Yes you were correct it was the color management, as I went back today to drill through all of the settings again, and I set the view to un tone mapped and that worked!  It seems that I can also use either Acesg that yields a more chromatic color or scene-linear Rec.709-sRGB that is more greyed out in color.  Now the question is to go with Aces or the latter?

Thanks again for pointing this out!

Best!

[davidarbor]

Great! Glad that was it. Those settings you just posted for RS in 3ds Max are disabling ACES and returning to a non-color managed workflow, which is the default for Substance Designer. For 3D, ACEScg is the way to go, and you can read a little more about that specific flavor of ACES here.

I started playing with ACES when it was implemented in Redshift just a few builds ago, and you're exactly right, it lets you have far more latitude in color, highlight rolloff, and you can push an image much further than with sRGB. I'm sticking with ACES as I don't see a reason to go back, and as I mentioned above, I also went into the Designer prefs and enabled OCIO and ACES.

[davescm]

Are you using the plug in for 3DS Max and selecting the material for a specific render engine?

https://substance3d.adobe.com/plugins/substance-in-3ds-max/

Dave

[berylsky]

Hi Davescm,

Yes I do use the plugin for 3ds Max when I need a material in the moment and prefer to make library materials from scratch, because if you use the conversion of a Substance Material to Redshift then put those converted materials in to a library for reuse the file gets really large.  I wish there was a choice when you do use the conversion you could somehow drop the maps in the substance 2 map, so you would have a true Redshift or any other type without the substance 2 map then the material file would not be so large.  I found this out when I downloaded a lot of substance source materials converting them then adding them to a 3ds max/mat library only to not be able to open them later because the file size was 10 fold.  the decision was made to only use those conversion for temporary visuals and create

Redshift materials from scratch to keep file size down and to not be down if there is some issue with the plugins.

Thank you for following up!

Best!

[davescm]

If the plug in is working correctly, but importing a set of individual maps is not, then look closely at the following (my answer is generic as I do not have 3DS Max installed here but the principles apply to importing into any software).

1. Are you exporting the correct set of maps for your material and render engine (e.g. Diffuse/Spec/Gloss or Base/Metal/Roughness) also check the format of the normal map (openGL or Direct X)

2. Make sure each map is going to the correct material input

3. Make sure the input for each map is set appropriately to match the exported map (e.g. Diffuse/Base Color might be colour with sRGB whilst Height would be grey with Linear gamma - sometimes labelled gamma 1.0)

Dave

[berylsky]

Hi Dave,

Thank you for response and yes I am using correct map standards as was defined by Redshift for 3ds Max.

Thanks!