Stager vs Dimension Decal Quality Improvements

[JMathews]

Hello everyone!  My name is Jeanette Mathews - I'm the product manager for both Adobe Dimension and Substance 3D Stager.  Placing graphics quickly onto models has been a core capability in both of these tools.  When we launched Stager there was a ton of changes in our rendering and material technology, which caused the quality of decals placed on models to go down significantly compared to what had been avialable in Dimension.

Unfortunately, it took a long time before we were able to address these issues.  We sincerely apologize for the impact to your work in the mean time. Improvements to Stagers decaling quality were completed over the summer and are included in Substance 3D Stager 2.1.1.  Here are some screenshots comparing Dimension and Stager. 

We hope that these improvements make using the decal and image placement in Stager better.  As you can see the final results are actually better than Dimension was in some cases.

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Limitations, tips & tricks

Short version summary

• Save your decals at around 2000x2000 pixels + larger ideally, they are rasterized on import
• Make sure your materials are also larger (4096x4096 ideally)
• The UVs of an object can greatly affect how the resolution of decals look.  Stager does not have manual UV-ing tools.

Rasterization of vector graphics on import:

Stager does not natively render vector graphics.  When you import an Illustrator file it is rasterized at the size the Illustrator document was saved to.  We recommend saving decal graphics at least at 2000x2000 pixels to ensure there's enough resolution in the image.

Resolution of underlying material:

Decals are composited on top of the object materials.  If the material resolution is small, the decal may only take up a small portion of the material texture and the result can be lower quality decals.

In these screenshots you see the same decal applied over the same material.  In the top, the material resolution is only 1024 px, and the decal is blurry.  In the bottom, the material resolution is 4096, and the decal is sharper.

UV resolution limitations:

Decals are 2D images.  Materials are an asset that have several 2D images (textures) bundled with them to control different propeties.  In both cases the images are 2D and need to be mapped onto the 3D surface of a model.  This happens usually through a system called UVWs, where the object is flattened from 3D into 2D.  Imagine cutting up and flattening a cardboard box.  The materials and decals are applied in this flattened 2D space, and then the result is simply viewed in the 3D viewport.

Here is a screenshot showing the UVWs for the jar object example.  In the UVw layout the circle areas are the lid and jar bottom while the rectangles are the inside and outside of the jar surface itself.  Despite the fact that the jar appears to take the majority of the space in the 3D viewport, the UVW layout you can see the area with the logo is actually only a small amount of the total texture.

Using the above material example, if you have a material that is 2048 x 2048 resolution, that fills the entire UVW square area.  But the decal is only a very small area compared to the entire UVWs, only about 500x300 pixels!  Even though the original decal was 2000x2000 pixels, it's being rendered at about 1/4 resolution because of the material being smaller.

[AlanGilbertson]

Hey Jeanette!

That is a superb breakdown of the problems and their solutions! It's going to be super helpful going forward in answering people's questions. Thank you!

My follow-up question would be, "Where does resolution (on the model) come from?" And, for that matter, which definition of resolution are we talking about? There's absolute resolution (so many pixels) and effective resolution (px/inch, or pixel density). A material has an absolute resolution, but the quality of a graphic applied to a model depends upon pixel density.

Say one has three cubes whose dimensions in Stager are 2 cm x 2 cm, 20 cm x 20 cm, and 200 cm x 200 cm respectively, and they all have the same material applied at the same resolution (4096 px, let's say). What happens to the pixel density of the decal on each of these cubes when it fills one face, and how does all of that relate to the output resolution at render time?

[Berklie]

Hi @JMathews,!

Might this great work by the team lead to finally squashing this bug (which, unfortunately, keeps me using Version 2.0.2):

Decal Issue since 2.1.0 REGRESSION

Thank you!

[mad_muppet]

Oh hey you're back again. Looks like a 7 month hiatus, hope you're OK.

How's it going with that native ARM support for Apple Silicon from the Adobe Substance suite that you haven't been able to talk about for closing in on 2 years now? Seems like "not gonna happen"?

Sincerely do hope you're OK.

Adobe not so much, pretty up to here with Adobe. 🙂

[Erik27303813sfpq]

I have a latest version of Stager... and labels still don't work properly. I created a model in Shapr3D and imported it into Stager. I can apply materials, no problem. Manipulate and position the model... no problem. But labels act like they're popping in and out of the multiverse on the surface of the model. And when I decide to do a UV wrap by exporting selected model's UV... what I get when I open it in photoshop is indecipherable. It's impossible to map my artwork onto the generated UV. This is absolute garbage and I've been waiting more than a year for a fix to be released.

[AlanGilbertson]

There are oddities with UVs that I don't pretend to understand, but one application's UVs can be another's chaos, and output from any given program isn't guaranteed to import seamlessly somewhere else. From various conversations over the last couple of years, I sense that UVs are more of a Black Art than people in the field are willing to admit. I have a vendor who uses Cinema 4D like a CAD program to build their booth designs, and no obj or fbx they send me will import in any usable form into Stager or Blender. Decals will show up on the back of a plane, or reversed, or both. With my workload, I don't have the bandwidth to get into C4D, so I just send them the graphic panels and let them apply them to the native file.

That said, I've had good success with models from other sources by telling Stager to generate UVs after importing the model, then exporting. The UVs are way less complex. I don't know that this would apply to Shapr3D exports, but give it a try. Also try using Painter, which is a much more mature program and far more capable when it comes to applying materials and graphic elements.

As an aside: The situation with 3D formats seems similar to the longstanding problem with EPS. Sending an Illustrator EPS to a CNC engraver or laser cutter, compared with the same shape exported as an EPS from Corel Draw, is a great example. They're both EPS, in theory, but the Illustrator export (if it even loads) will take forever to cut, where the Corel export zips along with no problems. Some EPS files will hard-crash InDesign or Open Office but work fine in Word or PowerPoint. I've yet to meet anyone who can give a coherent explanation as to why.

[Erik27303813sfpq]

thanks. I too have noticed that generating UVs after OBJ/FBX import, then exporting the selected Object's UV does typically yield more useable results. But there are times when I do that and still... for the life of me, cannot figure out the UV. 

As for EPS files, I hear you. I don't bother importing .eps' into my InDesign files for that reason. Back in the early 90's I never had troubles bringing EPS into Quark XPress docs. But that was 30 years ago. I"ve been an InDesign user since they released the first Beta in 2002.