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fabs79
- Messages
- 293
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- 28 Aug 2020
- #1
Hi, I have some questions about how non Metallic non PBR textures can be implemented into MSFS2020 with the Blender to MSFS toolbox. First, the standard MSFS material mode shows a Metallic texture node in the blender node tree with the separate RGB channels representing ambient occlusion, metalness and roughness. Now what do I have to do with materials that simply are not Metallic? Like wood, rock, bricks and so on. When I download materials like that they usually just lack a Metallic texture, featuring only diffuse, normal, displacement and roughness maps. Should I just leave the Metallic channel unconnected? Or do I use a completely black texture for the metalness channel to tell the engine "this is not a metal"?
Second, I have many textures that are optimized for a specular, not Metallic workflow, which usually means they don't have a metalness or roughness map but instead a gloss and reflection map. Can I somehow use these maps in the toolbox, too? Shouldn't gloss be similar to roughness in determining how "shiny" a material is? And reflection similar to Metallic properties?
Thanks and cheers,
Fabian
Vitus
Resource contributor
- Messages
- 1,480
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- 28 Aug 2020
- #2
Yes, the PBR workflow allows for non-metallic materials. You just need to tone down the metallic value and play with the roughness. But the better way with all of this is to upgrade your texture workflow and either integrate Substance Painter, or similar to have those texture maps generated for you.
No, you really should not use the textures from the specular workflow with PBR materials. While you can experiment with it the way you suggested, those maps are compiled in a very different way and not interchangeble. Even on a more basic level - "diffuse" is NOT the same as "albedo"! You'll be better off starting from scratch if you ask me...
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fabs79
- Messages
- 293
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- 28 Aug 2020
- #3
Thanks Vitus. The problem is that I have very few full PBR materials to work with. There are only a few resources for materials like that and most of them are pretty expensive. Texture Haven is the only site I know that offers free full PBR materials with only around 200 available (mist of which seem to be medieval brick walls not really suited for flightsim) and other sites like textures.com or poliigon only have a handful of free PBR textures. I guess I'll have to see how my models look with a mixture of real PBR materials and "fake" materials created with Materialize or derived from specular materials. After all it's my first freeware I'm making and it's such a remote place that most people probably won't really care I mainly started work on this scenery to learn the basics of Blender and my next project will hopefully be a little better looking.
LuisB
- Messages
- 23
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- 17 Sep 2020
- #4
As Vitus suggested, it is better to integrate Substance Painter or other similar software like ArmorPaint (open source) or Quixel Mixer to your workflow, it will make your life easier in all sense (result- and timewise!). In Subtance Painter, for example, you don't need to buy any type of additional textures, with the stock materials you can do quite a lot (PBR and non-PBR) and if you get a monthly subscription, you can download 30 materials per month that will give you more flexibility while texturing; there are also other places where you can download materials for free. As personal experience, I spent last year learning how to texture my models with Blender and Gimp, they are quite powerful but you need to use a lot of your time to obtain the desired results, and even after that, they will not be as good as with these softwares. I learned a huge amount of things but after I bought a software I realized that I could have used my time better to learn other things.
thetford569
- Messages
- 266
- Country
- 17 Sep 2020
- #5
LuisB said:
As Vitus suggested, it is better to integrate Substance Painter or other similar software like ArmorPaint (open source) or Quixel Mixer to your workflow, it will make your life easier in all sense (result- and timewise!). In Subtance Painter, for example, you don't need to buy any type of additional textures, with the stock materials you can do quite a lot (PBR and non-PBR) and if you get a monthly subscription, you can download 30 materials per month that will give you more flexibility while texturing; there are also other places where you can download materials for free. As personal experience, I spent last year learning how to texture my models with Blender and Gimp, they are quite powerful but you need to use a lot of your time to obtain the desired results, and even after that, they will not be as good as with these softwares. I learned a huge amount of things but after I bought a software I realized that I could have used my time better to learn other things.
Sounds like you are using the workflow that I am trying to learn. I am still learning Blender but I want to use Substance Painter for PBR texturing. Am I right in that I model in Blender and bake the AO in Blender and then export both to Substance Painter to do my texturing and then finally back into Blender for the final export to FS? I am trying to make sure my plan of action is correct.
LuisB
- Messages
- 23
- Country
- 17 Sep 2020
- #6
Indeed, that's quite similar to what I'm doing. There are many ways you can take during your workflow depending on the complexity of your model. Sometimes I bake the normal maps in Blender when I have too many parts and want to control each of them properly. In other cases I do everything within SP, including normal and AO maps. Right know I'm trying to generate a new workflow where I mark all necessary seams for my model, unwrap them with Blender, import the model in SP and use the automatic unwrap from SP to optimize the UV Map, then I export my model back to Blender and make some small fixes to the new UV layout. I am quite happy with the result, I have a better use of the UV space and is faster than optimize all by hand. Blender needs some improvements in this area.
thetford569
- Messages
- 266
- Country
- 17 Sep 2020
- #7
LuisB said:
Indeed, that's quite similar to what I'm doing. There are many ways you can take during your workflow depending on the complexity of your model. Sometimes I bake the normal maps in Blender when I have too many parts and want to control each of them properly. In other cases I do everything within SP, including normal and AO maps. Right know I'm trying to generate a new workflow where I mark all necessary seams for my model, unwrap them with Blender, import the model in SP and use the automatic unwrap from SP to optimize the UV Map, then I export my model back to Blender and make some small fixes to the new UV layout. I am quite happy with the result, I have a better use of the UV space and is faster than optimize all by hand. Blender needs some improvements in this area.
Interesting. That sounds like it would be better use of time. I am following Bill Womacks tutorial videos and he did the AO in Blender so that's where I kinda figured I would get that far and then take it into Substance Painter.
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fabs79
- Messages
- 293
- Country
- 17 Sep 2020
- #8
LuisB said:
As Vitus suggested, it is better to integrate Substance Painter or other similar software like ArmorPaint (open source) or Quixel Mixer to your workflow, it will make your life easier in all sense (result- and timewise!). In Subtance Painter, for example, you don't need to buy any type of additional textures, with the stock materials you can do quite a lot (PBR and non-PBR) and if you get a monthly subscription, you can download 30 materials per month that will give you more flexibility while texturing; there are also other places where you can download materials for free. As personal experience, I spent last year learning how to texture my models with Blender and Gimp, they are quite powerful but you need to use a lot of your time to obtain the desired results, and even after that, they will not be as good as with these softwares. I learned a huge amount of things but after I bought a software I realized that I could have used my time better to learn other things.
Hi and thank you for your suggestions, I'd love to try Substance Painter, it looks great but the subscription based payment is something that usually keeps me from buying a software, because sometimes real life keeps me so busy that I don't do any modeling or scenery design for weeks or even months. That means that I'd have to pay a monthly fee for something I'm not even using and I don't like that especially when I'm only doing freeware as a hobby. I looked into armor paint and it seems quite good, but as always with things published on GitHub I'm obviously too dumb to figure out how to even install it. After a while I found an option to download a zip file with several subfolders, but I can't find any executable file in there so I don't even know how to install the damn thing.
OzWookiee
- Messages
- 392
- Country
- 18 Sep 2020
- #9
fabs79 said:
Hi and thank you for your suggestions, I'd love to try Substance Painter, it looks great but the subscription based payment is something that usually keeps me from buying a software, because sometimes real life keeps me so busy that I don't do any modeling or scenery design for weeks or even months. That means that I'd have to pay a monthly fee for something I'm not even using and I don't like that especially when I'm only doing freeware as a hobby. I looked into armor paint and it seems quite good, but as always with things published on GitHub I'm obviously too dumb to figure out how to even install it. After a while I found an option to download a zip file with several subfolders, but I can't find any executable file in there so I don't even know how to install the damn thing.
You can buy the binaries here and get lifetime updates: https://armorpaint.org/download.html
LOTS of tutorials on YT for these software also
LuisB
- Messages
- 23
- Country
- 18 Sep 2020
- #10
fabs79 said:
Hi and thank you for your suggestions, I'd love to try Substance Painter, it looks great but the subscription based payment is something that usually keeps me from buying a software, because sometimes real life keeps me so busy that I don't do any modeling or scenery design for weeks or even months. That means that I'd have to pay a monthly fee for something I'm not even using and I don't like that especially when I'm only doing freeware as a hobby. I looked into armor paint and it seems quite good, but as always with things published on GitHub I'm obviously too dumb to figure out how to even install it. After a while I found an option to download a zip file with several subfolders, but I can't find any executable file in there so I don't even know how to install the damn thing.
I am totally with you on this one, I don't like to be paying for something I'm not even using and that's why I have a permanent license of SP. As far as I know, you can still buy them on Steam (that's what I did) and you have support and updates for one year, plus if you wait for Black Friday or the Winter Sale, there is a chance to get 20% discount which is nice. The only disadvantage is that you are not allowed to download materials, except for those that are completely free, but to be honest, a lot of those materials can be recreated with the tools you already have within the stock resources.
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fabs79
- Messages
- 293
- Country
- 18 Sep 2020
- #11
LuisB said:
I am totally with you on this one, I don't like to be paying for something I'm not even using and that's why I have a permanent license of SP. As far as I know, you can still buy them on Steam (that's what I did) and you have support and updates for one year, plus if you wait for Black Friday or the Winter Sale, there is a chance to get 20% discount which is nice. The only disadvantage is that you are not allowed to download materials, except for those that are completely free, but to be honest, a lot of those materials can be recreated with the tools you already have within the stock resources.
Do I understand correctly that I could buy a Substance Painter license on steam for one year but still use it afterward the license has expired, just without the updates and downloadable materials? That would be acceptable. Does substance painter allows for importing materials from other sources, like texture haven or textures.com or does it force you to use its own materials exclusively? Thanks and cheers, Fabian
LuisB
- Messages
- 23
- Country
- 19 Sep 2020
- #12
The license is permanent, the maintenance is the one that will expire after one year (updates) but you can pay again for it, either by extending the service with Allegorithmic or buying a new license on steam and yes, you can import textures from any source. The materials from SP give you some flexibility because they are "programmed" with Substance Designer, that means that you can change specific parameters depending on how the material was made up, however many of them can be imitated (to some degree) with "smart materials" which you can make by yourself.
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fabs79
- Messages
- 293
- Country
- 19 Sep 2020
- #13
Ok I'll look into it. However if I don't get sorted out how to get that damn Terra forming polygons to do what I want I'll probably stop scenery design altogether...
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fabs79
- Messages
- 293
- Country
- 19 Sep 2020
- #14
LuisB said:
The license is permanent, the maintenance is the one that will expire after one year (updates) but you can pay again for it, either by extending the service with Allegorithmic or buying a new license on steam and yes, you can import textures from any source. The materials from SP give you some flexibility because they are "programmed" with Substance Designer, that means that you can change specific parameters depending on how the material was made up, however many of them can be imitated (to some degree) with "smart materials" which you can make by yourself.
One last question, can I import a readily textured model from blender into substance painter just to add some details like rust, scratches or other things or do I have to do the whole texturing process within substance painter?
LuisB
- Messages
- 23
- Country
- 19 Sep 2020
- #15
fabs79 said:
One last question, can I import a readily textured model from blender into substance painter just to add some details like rust, scratches or other things or do I have to do the whole texturing process within substance painter?
Yes, it's possible. I bake for example the normal maps in blender and export them to substance painter. When exporting the textures from SP, the normal map now includes not only what I did on Blender but also the details done in SP.
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GaryGB
- Messages
- 7,708
- Country
- 20 Sep 2020
- #16
fabs79 said:
I looked into armor paint and it seems quite good, but as always with things published on GitHub I'm obviously too dumb to figure out how to even install it.
After a while I found an option to download a zip file with several subfolders, but I can't find any executable file in there so I don't even know how to install the damn thing.
ArmorPaint
:
GitHub - armory3d/armortools: 3D Content Creation Tools
3D Content Creation Tools. Contribute to armory3d/armortools development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
:
Build software better, together
GitHub is where people build software. More than 100 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.
github.com
: An option to build for free via Visual Studio, from a (appropriate) GitHub download package ...is mentioned / illustrated here:
Armorpaint for Free? Build it! (Windows)
ArmorPaint is a stand-alone app for physically-based texture painting that aims to become an open source alternative for Substance Painter. As the name already suggests, it’s brought to you by the…
www.blendernation.com
GaryGB
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