vray and substance designer

[pg1]

Am wondering if anyone has a good workflow from substance painter to vray for PBR materials.
As far as I understand it the shader from Substance is GLSL so is it possible to get shaders across from substance to render in vray?

[pg1]

particularly in relation to this video which speaks about the Disney brdf model of metal roughness and specular/glossiness (which is what I assume is vray?)

[RobH22]

There has to be some guru out there who's wiring Substance Designer PBRs to Vraymtl. There has to be. They are being pretty quiet though. I've spent a week searching and found nothing.

[vlado]

Maybe would be best to ask them? I haven't really played with substance designer at all.

Best regards,
Vlado

[bmcaff]

I've just worked on a couple projects that used PBR maps in vray and it's really quite straightforward. I had to match pretty closely in game rendered assets using Vray and the big difference is in glossiness values. I added a color correct node (the 3rd party one) in between the map and the glossines channel and offset the value by about 30% thereby having the minimum glossiness value in the vray material be around 0.4ish. it gave pretty comparable results. For materials based on metalness I used 2 vraymats plugged into a vrayblend with the metalness maps as a mask between the two. The first is a normal shader and the second being a metalized version (diffuse map plugged into the reflect channel and the glossy map contribution lowered) Again the results were almost identical to the in game or PBR result.

I had dozens of models to convert so I created one shader and just swapped out the 3 maps that were required for each model (Albedo, Metalness+Glossy+reflectance, Normal). The big benefit is that there is no real adjusting because the maps control everything. PBR is big buzz right now in realtime and games but is basically what Vray has been doing all along.

Oh yeah! SD is very nice but shame it's not 8K enabled.

[joconnell]

I've put up a request for an osl shader - they use glsl for all their stuff and Sebastian Deguy is looking into it. In the mean time here's the docs for their shader, in particular the pbr-metal-rough html page.

painter_shader-doc.zip

[RobH22]

I've just worked on a couple projects that used PBR maps in vray and ...

I really appreciate this. It's a workflow that you wouldn't normally come up with and I'll give it a try. I hope the built in CC node works adequately. I don't have a 3rd party one. I have been using it to correct gamma differences already for diffuse maps so they aren't washed out. I'll post my results back here in hopes that it helps someone else like me.

Thanks 'bmcaff'...

The shader info 'joconnell' is interesting. I'm not a programmer but do understand the fundamentals. The document helps me to realize how complex these shaders are and how difficult it is to write one.

[RobH22]

Substance Workflow.zip

I've just worked on a couple projects that used PBR maps in vray ...

Just reporting back. This workflow is working out very nicely. I can't figure out how to measure things in Max's Slate Material Editor so trying to find out if the glossiness value is 0.4ish or not is proving difficult but I've just visually tweaked the CC node in the 'Lightness/Advanced' panel. I Gamma corrected to .45 per Substance Designer's recommendations to get their Linear gamma into Max properly and then I tweaked the 'Pivot' to 0.21 and the 'Lift/Offset' to -0.92. Those seem to work like contrast and lightness. Maybe that's exactly what they are, I just don't know. But, just from a purely subjective standpoint, that's giving me something that looks very close to the SD material in it's 3D Viewer. I then independently tested three other SD materials by connecting them to the node rig I created and all of them looked very, very close to the original in SD.

The workflow I'm using in SD is the Physically Based (specular/glossiness) preset and then between the PBR material node in SD and the SD Outputs, I put a 'basecolor_metallic_roughness_to_diffuse_specular_ glossiness' node (it's in PBR Utilities...and I'll call it "BMRtoDSG") which writes the 'metallic' and 'roughness' maps out to 'specular' and 'glossiness' properly. I pull the AO, Normal and Height directly over to the outputs. That BMRtoDSG node is part of the secret. Well, it "IS" the secret I think.

I've spent two weeks trying to get to this point, posted dozens of posts, watched probably 50 videos and read hundreds of forum posts. I hope this helps someone else trying to get Substance Designer PBR materials into Vray. I'm also attaching my material that has my nodes in it. They seem to work pretty well. Feel free to modify it and if you find a better solution post back here and share.

[bmcaff]

Glad to hear it's working for you. The standard max CC should work fine too.

SD is a great tool and once you know the relationship between the creation tools and the final render you're golden. I see the preview as just an indication of what I'll get in my final render. Obviously the less adjustment you have to do to get the same result the better but if you approach the creation process as you would painting textures in photoshop, with the understanding of what values you'll need in your shader then it's a little bit easier. That is your lower glossy values being around 0.4ish, it helps.

From my point of view tools like this being used to make game assets makes my job a lot easier when doing key art or renders of the game assets as I don't have baked in AO and lighting to deal with. The convergence of tech from both ends, the move towards PBR in games and the move towards RT in rendering has a big impact on how I work.

[RobH22]

That is your lower glossy values being around 0.4ish, it helps.

One more question about this and I'll leave it alone. Where are you setting the "0.4ish" that you are talking about. Is this a 'picker' measurement or are you setting a value somewhere? Not big issue but if it's a box where you are setting a value that's better. I'm looking for a fairly good default profile and the less subjective tweaks I do initially, the better. Obviously the 3d world is not a set-it-and-forget-it environment and we always need to tweak. But, if you are setting a .4 somewhere and that works in most cases, then that's good.

[bmcaff]

I don't know the maths (there is a good explanation that I haven't explore) but from experience values between 0.4-0.99 seem to work for me and closely represent what I see in other renderers like MR and PBR materials. This is why I'm remapping the colours in the PBR glossy map from pure black to about 40% black thereby shifting the glossy range up to where I normally feel is right in a vray material.

[RobH22]

I understand now. I just wasn't sure what you were referring to when you said 0.4ish. You meant 40% black in a range from 0 to 1. I interpreted it as you setting some switch to 0.4. Got it. Thanks for the clarification.