Substance Painter and rendering for a non-pbr environment...

[Dictatorshop]

Hi all!

I have Alegorithmic's Substance Painter application and it is so great for getting great looking items... that is until I TRY to get the darned things into SL - then FAIL.  The app has a "baked light" filter that gets some detail on but you really don't get that fully baked thing going on.  I have been banging my head against this for weeks trying to find SOME way to get these great textures OUT of SP and into SL.  Has anyone found a way - that does not require the use of Blender - to get the textures rendered out looking anything like the originals?  I am a Maya user.

This is so @#$ frustrating I am ready to go back to Photoshop and give up on rendered textures.  Anybody have a Maya-Substance Painter-??fill in the blank??-Second Life workflow that doesn't require gyrations, hair pulling, and the burning of rubber chickens?

[Dassni]

I generally avoid baking actual shadows into textures now as I think a lot of people have shadows enabled in their viewers. If I want some subtle shadows, then as you say the baked light material/filters work well (there's one with lights as well as environment too which is useful). The real pain with that is it only seems to work if you're working with the PBR shaders.

For the times when I have wanted shadows I've just baked the shadow maps in Blender and then added them as fill layers in Substance Painter. Another thing I often do to get that unrealistic "SL look" of lots of heavy AO is to add a couple of multiplied fill layers with the Substance Painter generated AO textures on top of everything else, even after I've added a couple of AO smart masks.

Substance Painter is great, but it's not really setup for the diffuse/bump/spec model that SL uses and most substances tend only work well with PBR metal/rough shaders (although substances from Allegorithmic's Substance Source usually work well with diffuse/spec if they're dielectric). 

 

[Dassni]

Also make sure you're exporting the right texture maps. Give me a shout in-world if you want me to send you my export presets for both PBR and non-PBR shaders.

[Cube Republic]

You need to make sure normals are set to openGL in substance painter. I don't believe this is the default. You can get some good results in second life using the alpha channels in the normal and specular map to enhance the look of your models. I've had some nice results using the concavity in the alpha channel of the normal map. 

[Dictatorshop]

Hi again,  thanks for the replies.  I am exporting OpenGL, I am exporting only Diffuse, Specular & Normal maps and I am not trying to bake "shadows" per se.  What i have been trying to do is make a proper bumpy looking leather texture.  To do that, the little specular highlights need to be baked onto the difuse, otherwise in sl if someone doesnt have their advanced lighting on the texture just looks like crap.  

@Dassni, I sent you an IM in world, thanks.

@Cube Republic I am not sure how to do this, could you please explain?

[Klytyna]

1 hour ago, Dictatorshop said:

Hi again,  thanks for the replies.  I am exporting OpenGL, I am exporting only Diffuse, Specular & Normal maps and I am not trying to bake "shadows" per se.  What i have been trying to do is make a proper bumpy looking leather texture.  To do that, the little specular highlights need to be baked onto the difuse, otherwise in sl if someone doesnt have their advanced lighting on the texture just looks like crap.

@Dassni, I sent you an IM in world, thanks.

@Cube Republic I am not sure how to do this, could you please explain?

Generally, baked in highlights tend to look crap with specular systems, unless they are really subtle, the kind of 'baked highlights' you see in non specular graphics tend to look crap when the shine goes on. Assuming you have a spec map for your leather texture, try applying that in photoshop as an adjustment layer of some sort, to perk up the 'highlight' areas without resorting to full baked shine,

The textures are going to look less than brilliant for somebody, with two competing systems, you just have to decide who gets the dirty end of the stick, old or new...
 

[arton Rotaru]

...dirty end of the stick.... I kinda like that analogy.

I don't use Maya nor SP. However, what I would try to do is to bump up the normal strength of the leather material in SP a bit, export the maps. Take the normal map and convert it to a Cavity map again (also known as a Curvature map). This cavity overlayed on top of the diffuse/albedo should bring the leather to life a bit more. If you only want the highlights, you can take this new cavity map into Photoshop, and adjust the curves and levels so that only the highlights are left (it's black with only white highlights then). This map also placed on top of the diffuse (blend mode Screen).

[Jamie Rozenberg]

For SP you need to make sure you are texturing in solo mode, have a filter and environment in your layer stack to control your lighting, and to make a custom export of only the rbg using only the base color. Though also note height does not convert to SL, only roughness, which for a leather texture will be more ideal anyway for you. Hope this helps. 

[Sy Beck]

Second Life and even Sansar are still way behind the curve on gaming graphics.  Substance Painter is indeed a fantastic application, but using it for SL is pointless as 95%+ of what it can do cannot be used in SL and that is,in the end, all the good/nice stuff. There is though nothing in Substance Painter you can do, in relation to SL, that you can't do in Maya/Blender/3DS/PS/GIMP.  As long as SL/Sansar only support diffuse, normal and spec maps then Substance Painter (for SL use) is a Ferrari propped up on bricks.

I use Maya myself and the only advantage that I've found by using Substance Painter is that it can do an AO map a bit quicker and easier than using Maya's own AO bake and I guess you have the utility for making all your maps in one place; bar baking your AO onto a diffuse in PS/GIMP later.  As someone said earlier you have to make a choice of who gets the dirty end of the stick and baking in spec highlights should be history and superfluous by now and is catering for an ever dwindling base and makes your textures look funky and off in a lot of Windlights and to a lot of users.  If you still want to do it though there's a dirty work around using Substance painter's baked light filter.  A You Tube search on "substance painter baked light filter" should find it for you though I'm led to believe that the "dirty" end of it is that you have to screenshot resulting maps and align and blend them in PS/GIMP.

[Chic Aeon]

Not sure if this is relevant to you as I don't use Substance painter but the upcoming version of Blender has a new type of shader which apparently has something to do with Substance Painter as it was mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial. I haven't watched much of it, just wanted it in my queue for later :D.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H5W6C_Mbck&t=1224s