Substance 3D materials into V-Ray for Sketchup workflow

V-Ray V-Ray for SketchUp General
1

Hello all,

I’ve recently found Adobe Substance 3D Sampler to create materials from scratch and to be honest it would appear to be a bit of a game changer for me and the work I do.

Is there a recommended workflow for Substance to V-Ray? There would appear to be a plugin for 3DS MAX but not for Sketchup.

Exporting maps from Substance seems pretty straight forward but the set up within V-Ray for those maps and their correct slots isn’t always apparent. I just want to make sure that when I’m creating a new material that all of the information that is being carried over to V-Ray is correct, as sometimes the materials can look a little different.

Does anyone know if there is a plugin for Sketchup in the works at all?

Any guidance or advice would be really appreciated

Thank you

2

Substance PBR textures in V-Ray

I don’t think there is a plugin from adobe for SketchUp/V-ray, it wouldn’t be hard to write a ruby script to do it though.

Substance uses fairly standard PBR (Physically Based Rendering) nomenclature. If you’re exporting from Substance Player (I don’t have Substance 3D Sampler, but i assume it’s the same) the following is a basic setup.

image
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In V-Ray

  1. Base Color

    • Load the ‘Base Color’ map into the Diffuse slot using a Bitmap.

  2. Reflection

    • Set the Reflection Color to around 0.5.
    • Load the ‘Roughness’ map into the Reflection Roughness slot.
    • Under Surface Control, change Glossiness to Roughness.

  3. Metalness

    • Load the ‘Metallic’ map into the Metallic slot.

  4. Normal

    • Open the Bump Map settings.
    • Change the bump type to Normal Map.
    • Load the exported ‘Normal’ texture.
    • image
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Optional maps

Height and Ambient Occlusion (AO) can also be used in other ways (mix nodes, geometry displacement), but they aren’t required for a simple PBR material setup.

Using the textures directly in SketchUp

You can also load the maps directly into SketchUp and let V-Ray handle the material.

The main difference is that the Base Color map is loaded into Texture Image rather than the V-Ray Diffuse slot and SketchUp mixes in the ambient occlusion into the base colour.

If your substance image has baked in ambient occlusion, then you may find it easier to load them straight in via sketchup- which will create the mix node for you.

There is a quirk with the normal maps which depend on A: how you’ve exported them from substance and B: how you’ve loaded them into V-ray/SketchUp. The surface may look inside out if this is the case.

3

alternatively, I’ve just banged together a little sketchup extension here - you’ll need to select the base color image and it will load in all of the maps into SketchUp.

elmtec_substance_import.zip (2.1 KB)

This leaves some of the interpretation up to V-ray

4

Hey Adam,

Thank you so very much for your detailed reply, this will help hugely.

Don’t know how you just threw that extension together so quickly, amazing, but when I installed it the extension is looking for a .tga file, is that correct?

Thanks again

5

These AI tools are mad for making little things like if you know a bit about what you are doing :slight_smile:

It should accept a PNG or jpeg also, but it is looking for the default naming structure that substance players uses for exports.

materialname_Base_Color.jpg for example

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The files you get out are dependent on how the file was authored - I have only included the ones sketchup will deal with.

Things like specular_level can be loaded in manually if you don’t want to set the reflection color by hand.

6

Brilliant, thank you mate.