Albedo vs AlbedoM

CandyStripes05

Just curious as to the difference between the two of them in DDO

I'm guessing the M stands for metalness? is it how they compress different maps when exporting or something?

Bek

Basically yeah - An albedo (or albedoM as quixel calls it) texture using the metalness workflow stores the metal parts (as defined in the metalness map) specular information within the albedo. No albedo information for metals is needed, as they don't absorb light, so instead of wasting all that texture space with pure black, the space can be used for other information. This is so you can have per-pixel coloured spec for 'free' within the albedo texture, which was almost certainly going to be an RGB texture anyway. Meanwhile the gloss/metalness can be greyscale. So it's just a clever way to pack your texture information. of course you have to be using a pbr metalness shader that knows to take the albedo parts that are also metals and apply that texture information as spec and not albedo, but that's only a problem if you're using an old pre-metalness engine.

If that doesn't make sense any of the PBR guides out there should cover this.

Synaesthesia

Well, Bek did my job for me! Pretty much covered it right there.

CandyStripes05

another question, I just watched a quick substance designer 4 tutorial and he used Diffuse / Normal / Roughness / Metallic / AO what would be the Quixel preset equivalent? So that once I export my final materials they could be used in the same pipeline as someone who gets there materials from Substance

leleuxart

CandyStripes05 said:

another question, I just watched a quick substance designer 4 tutorial and he used Diffuse / Normal / Roughness / Metallic / AO what would be the Quixel preset equivalent? So that once I export my final materials they could be used in the same pipeline as someone who gets there materials from Substance

A big problem you'll come across between different tutorials/artists/programs is the terminology. Even though he used a "Diffuse" texture, in order for it to be correct, it'd work the same exact way as the AlbedoM from Quixel, provided you're sticking to the Metalness pipeline. 

You'll just have to figure out if whoever is doing their Substance work is exporting their maps properly for whatever engine you're using(like UE4 having a flipped green channel, inverted Gloss, etc), and chances are Quixel has a preset already. 

Synaesthesia

SUITE has quite a few presets - several of which are roughness-based, like UE4 and UE4 (RMA-packed).