Using Substance materials in the exported vrscene?

[Nicinus]

I'm just starting out evaluating Vray for Unreal and am trying to quickly understand best workflows. Is it a bad idea to use Substance plugin materials, or do these need to be baked down before exporting? I've noticed that for example color correction nodes are undesirable and needs to be baked to simplify the material, but my workflow is more and more substance based so this seems to be quite a hurdle to have to do with all materials.

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, Nicinus

Is it a bad idea to use Substance plugin materials, or do these need to be baked down before exporting? I've noticed that for example color correction nodes are undesirable and needs to be baked to simplify the material

Yes, you do need to bake down the substance textures to static ones. Currently any composite(Composite, VRayComposite, Mix, etc.), color correction(Output, ColorCorrection, etc.) and procedural(VRayDirt,VRayDistance, Falloff, Noise, Cellular, Substance, etc.) maps are not supported and should be baked, where possible, for better import without missing assets. However we will improve the importer in future builds so that you will not be required to do much additional work and will have smoother experience.Cannot give you an ETA but please keep an eye out in the Announcement section of the forum where we post info and changelogs for new builds.

Best regards,
Alexander

[Nicinus]

Thanks Alexander,

about automating, and realizing that it has an artistic aspect, but is there any way that the importer could do a first pass on placing these shiny reflection balls? I mean we know which materials are shiny and the initial camera direction, right?

Or will this this be less of a problem as ray tracing develops in 4.23 and onwards?

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, Nicinus

By "shiny reflection balls" you probably mean the reflection capture probes. I will log that as a request. Maybe that step won't be necessary in future versions of Unreal (where ray tracing is enabled by default) but now you have to enable the ray tracing for each project and if you do not have a good graphics card to run that ray tracing, you will need those reflections probe.

Best regards,
Alexander