ANSWERED: Custom texturing in Quixel

Thane-

I was wondering if and/or how easy it is to do custom wear, scratches, gouges and other things to specific areas with Quixel. Like the wear on top of this radio for example. What about simple scratches or burnishing? Also, in the video below, near 37:19, a scratch pattern is put on the sword, can I still do stuff like this and work with Quixel at the same time?






[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gnh01WJOK8o[/ame]

Synaesthesia

Pretty much everything in that video is much easier in the Suite, you'll do it faster and it will be more realistic because it precisely follows your model's contours. If you need a specific grunge mask, you can import that and lay it on top of your UVs in Photoshop.

Eric Ramberg

Much like Synaesthesia says it is very possible! you can do it in a variety of different ways, you can custom paint directly on the maps in Dynamask, or add your custom grungemap, or the third option which I think is the best, wait just a tiiiiiny bit longer for the SUITE 2.0 to come out which has realtime 3D painting!

Thane-

I've been watching Quixel videos and playing around with it for the last couple days. So far im EXTREMELY impressed, especially with the stock mask selection presets and variety and quality of materials (ive only been in the smart material section so far,but the brick material in the regular materials section gave me a laugh for its quality) and also the logical useability of the interface. 3do is awesome too. I really think im going to like this software.

Pedro Amorim

Eric Ramberg wrote: »

Much like Synaesthesia says it is very possible! you can do it in a variety of different ways, you can custom paint directly on the maps in Dynamask, or add your custom grungemap, or the third option which I think is the best, wait just a tiiiiiny bit longer for the SUITE 2.0 to come out which has realtime 3D painting!

/me faints!

Thane-

Can i not ctrl-z? It seems to work in photoshop, but 3do and Ddo dont respond.

What is the /m at the texel density input? If i put in 4096, i am working with 4k in ddo and 3do yes?

Is there interated autobackup? I noticed i could mess up the maps pretty easily and cant seem to dind a way to backup.

Synaesthesia

There's no undo as far as I can tell, but it hasn't been a problem with my workflow at all.

If you instruct it to use 4096, yes, you will be working at 4k.

I don't know of any auto-backup outside of the native backup that Photoshop CS6 has in case of crashing.

Thane-

Thanks Synaethesia

Is 3do okay to use for portfolio shots. It looked somewhat nicer than marmoset on one of the tutorials.

Does it not support FBX?

Synaesthesia

There's no FBX support in the current version. I don't know if there's any intention to support anything beyond OBJ in future releases. Eric or another Quixel representative would have to chime in there. :poly002:

In regards to 3DO, I don't see why not. It's a good renderer. I've used it to create renders for some things here at the office that we're showing off.

Thane-

Okay i was worried about something not being exported with OBJ, like maybe tangents and binormals or something. I can't remember but someone said what ever it was was needed to prevent shading errors in certain situations. Anyway, thanks.

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Quixel really nailed the auxiliary wear details IMO. I did 4 years in autobody work, did tons of car restoration work, regularly scavenged junk yards and the subtle details i see in the wear effects seem spot on. Hope they don't change. In fact thats one the thoughts i had when using Substance, that i hoped they would always release old versions of new detail generation algorithms when significant changes were made. Mainly because i could envision nice features going down the drain pretty easily if the devs weren't careful, especially since personal preference/taste can vary so greatly among devs and devs can change, etc.

Synaesthesia

>auxiliary wear details

Are you referring to the Dynamask presets? If any of that ever changes, you can always make your own. I have several custom presets for the vehicles I develop - no two are ever quite the same, and the same preset won't always give the same result.

Thane-

Is the mask window able to indicate the currently enabled mask or display it again after choosing another one? I know the mask shows on the model initially in 3DO when opening the window, but i was hoping to go back to it and toggle it between other masks to compare.

If the suite crashes and my psd files are still up, is there a way to open DDO and start again right then or should i close the psd files and reload everything again?

Synaesthesia

You can switch between masks, but the only way to preview a mask without losing your current mask is to look at the mask's thumbnail. A workaround would be to save a preset out of each mask you like and switch between each preset to see how it looks on the model.

The Suite is simply a "cover" for Photoshop. If the files are loaded and visible (e.g. you have one of the DDO/NDO layers active) DDO or NDO will automatically switch over to the active project. This also works if you open up anything that isn't directly related to your project. DDO will go back to the base creator. If you select a DDO map in Photoshop and close DDO, it will restart immediately with the project loaded up again.

Thane-

My crashes were resulting in the DDO maps menu and 3DO going away, just the psds remained. Im getting tons of errors and weird things happening unfortunately. I will have to save a file every few minutes if i do a project, however it really started happening after i enable GPU rendering on my laptop in Photoshop and for Quixel i think so I'm going to try to disable that and see what happens. I've only been tinkering so far, so no worries. I have a couple times gotten the completely wrong result in addition to the crashes. And yet still i remain very excited to use the program!

Quixel, you guys have THE best rust material i've ever seen. And again, i just find the masks you guys use absolutely lovely.

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Question: Does anyone know if the height map actually "lifts" like a displacement map in quixel? I noticed some of the materials appear to jump off the surface. IE, the sides of the sphere look uneven with some of the materials for example.


Im also asking because of this example from here: http://advancedndo.tumblr.com/


Like is that some sort of occlusion calculation or is that a tessellated mesh hes applying it to?

Thane-

Just FYI: After switching back to integrated graphics on my laptop iva the Nividia settings, I don't seem to be getting any crashing. Phew!

That makes me wonder if it would be helpful for the others having crashing problems to try older drivers until 2.0 comes out.

If its of any help my system is a Dell XPS L702X with the 3GB dedicated version of the Nvidia 555M and the Intel 2630QM, 16GB ram, Photoshop CC and an up to date Windows 7. No anti-malware except Window's built in stuff.

I do not have the patch i saw in the other thread as i assumed it came with the version i downloaded recently, but i will double check sometime soon.

Thane-

If you want to rename this to Thane's dumb questions or "beginner questions" thread, go ahead

Heres another, sorry.

What maps should i work with or is there a guide to choosing which maps to enable for specific engines? What is the "roughness" map called in Quixel?

Synaesthesia

When you create a project, you should have the option to configure DDO to calibrate for a specific engine. For UE4, it will generate Albedo, Gloss, Metalness, Bump, Normals, and Ambient Occlusion. When you export, it will convert the gloss map into a roughness map, and the bump will be combined into the normals.

Thane-

Does the metalness workflow have a performance benefit for Quixel when using AlbedoM?

Synaesthesia

I don't see any situation where adding an additional map will improve performance, but if the engine supports metalness maps then you should be using that workflow.

Thane-

I thought the diffuse color and the metalness were in one texure, reducing the number of maps by one?


Also i forgot to ask. If there are any not-well-known performance tweaks like ini settings I'd love to hear them.

It would be nice if there a way to keep the dynamask viewer in main memory so it pops up right away. I still have tons of ram left for ddo according to task manager.

Synaesthesia

Not that I'm aware of in the Suite. The metalness map is its own *.PSD that the Suite loads if you're using a metalness workflow. If you want to combine the metalness map into the albedo map later, you have to do that manually right now.

I don't think you can keep Dynamask up indefinitely. It loads as-needed.

Thane-

Thanks Synaesthesia,


Will dynamask not use the AO map if it is not also created as an input mask? Ie, can i delete the AO map tab and have dynamask still have access?

I was wondering because: For the spec/gloss workflow, can i delete the AO input map and instead add it as a overlayed material with a diffuse material with the usual multiply blending mode? I wonder if i could save on some processing time or if it would make little difference. Same concern for the bump map.


What the benefit of the bump map alongside a normal map? I noticed many presents have both.


Again, truly sorry for the 20 questions.

Synaesthesia

>Will dynamask not use the AO map if it is not also created as an input mask?

I have no idea, honestly. I imagine it will still be there in memory or at a physical location, so DDO will reference it if needed. Give it a shot and find out.

I have a custom preset built specifically for making an DDO version of my AO layer. I don't see why you couldn't do it.

The bump channel is for custom normals. Anything you add in there will be combined with the normal channel on export.