Metal material is too dark in viewer

bitinn

(EDIT: I rewrote my question in the reply, because the original question wasn't clear)

Basically, in SP viewer they appear too dark, but they look fine in Unity or material preview.






Basically I need SP viewer to show what I would probably get in Unity, instead of guessing from experience what I might get...

pior

OP changed the original question and thread title after the first round of suggestions. All the suggestions listed below relate to the original topic of (quote) :

"how to achieve a good workflow of authoring metallic textures in SP when working with game engine such as Unity"

and are therefore not relevant to the current topic/bug report of supposedly dark SP materials.

- - - - -

When facing that kind of issues, what you need is official reference material provided by the makers of the engine. The train of thought goes as follows : 

• Recently, what has been the most representative use of PBR in Unity ? The Adam realtime movie.
• The assets from the Adam movie would therefore give you a point of reference for your own work, providing you texture references to match, and good lit environments.
• The assets from the Adam movie are offered as a free download by Unity, precisely for that purpose.

Problem solved !

bitinn

@pior Thx, but maybe you misread my question?

- As you can see, I have a procedural skybox and a directional light in Unity.

- But in SP I only have environment map. Which means, I will never quite get the right result without exporting textures to check in Unity.

- This is very tiring, because metallic materials in SP are quite dark in viewer, unless you crane up the EV or put them in Iray renderer. My mac doesn't have a powerful GPU, so it would took even longer to render in Iray.

- What I really want: disable the environmental map, just use a default light (like in Maya or Unity), so I can see what metal material looks like.

- I understand I can't avoid checking actual result in Unity, but at least I save myself moving back and forth every time I author some material.

(I am not sure my rant is understandable, not if, I apologise for my bad bad english.)

pior

My advice came from having worked multiple times on PBR asset authored in SP and used in Unity. The only way to work that way is, first and foremost, to make sure that you have good reference materials (I mean material in the broad sense : textures, scenes, models). There are a handful of special settings to take into account in order to make Unity display PBR with good parity with something like SP, many of which are not in the default scene. Download the Adam assets.

As far as I am concerned this was the only way for me to gain a good understanding of that sort of stuff, because unlike recent versions of UE4, Unity does not come with a default scene/settings suited for PBR authoring. It is, however, perfectly possible to achieve 100% parity between UE4, Unity, SP and Toolbag (been there, done that )

pior

Here are some practical examples showing PBR assets in Unity, using the Adam scene assets to help with scene lighting. The Adam scene assets come with special post processing and probe lights, both of which are quite important to achieve a look very similar to SP.



 All these assets would look pretty much the same in SP. Once that is well established with a solid scene working well, working between SP and Unity will be super smooth

At the end of the day, what I am getting at is that if you tackle the issue with just that one small metal plate for a test, you will likely miss a ton of important (and unexpected) factors to consider. Good, official reference will be the key to achieve good parity (similarly to measuring the thickness of the arm of a reference character to make sure that the ones on your model are not too skinny )

bitinn

@pior I am sorry pior, while your suggestions are fantastic, and I know they are. I just don't think you are answering my question at all.

I am not saying my Unity result look bad, or my SP result look bad, or that I am trying to get them to look the same.

No. period.

I am just saying I can't check my material in SP because it's too damn dark, I need a light.

pior

Your question was : 

how to achieve a good workflow of authoring metallic textures in SP when working with game engine such as Unity

My proposed answer is :

Spend more time with the officially provided resources, in order to fully understand how the system works on the Unity side. Gamma correction, exposure, probe lights and post processing are all contributing factors, and go beyond just making a light brighter.

bitinn

@pior

I am dumb, so help me on this one:

- Ignore Unity for now. It doesn't matter, trust me on this one for now.

- I take the official PreviewSphere from SP

- Apply a built-in material

- The material preview and viewer preview looks so different. I HAVE TO increase EV to get anywhere near the preview result.

- Can you suggest why?

- Is there anything I can do to get a good look at the material without increasing EV? (it will overexpose non-metal material)

pior

Who knows ! Could be the way they generate their thumbnails, could be your GPU not being supported. This is of course a different topic altogether from your original question, and I cannot answer it. You'll have to wait for the official Substance guys to chime in for that.

bitinn

pior said:

Who knows ! Could be the way they generate their thumbnails, could be your GPU not being supported. This is of course a different topic altogether from your original question, and I cannot answer it. You'll have to wait for the official Substance guys to chime in for that.

That's ok, I am just saying this is what prompted my question in the first place. I have changed OP title.

I should note non-metal base material or even smart materials looks fine, so I think this is inherit to SP?

Also ping @Jerc, hoping you can take a brief look.

kmacneil91

I find that I always have to manually play with the color of my metal materials as well as the amount of roughness/metalness in the Properties panel to get the desired result I want. 

bitinn

After checking on Windows with a better GPU, I can confirm this is a case of unsupported graphic card.

Unfortunately, I can't easily upgrade my MBP 2015 without an eGPU, so that's that.

Froyok

What is your GPU in the case it doesn't work ?

bitinn

Froyok said:

What is your GPU in the case it doesn't work ?

I will be so grateful if you can investigate and fix this issue (even though I know it's slightly below the supported GPU level)

Froyok

Ha yeah, Intel GPUs are really not recommended for our software unfortunately.
(Also your GPU is just below our minimum specs : https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/tech-specs )

bitinn

Froyok said:

Ha yeah, Intel GPUs are really not recommended for our software unfortunately.
(Also your GPU is just below our minimum specs : https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/tech-specs )

I know, it would be great if you can find a way to fix this. If not, I will make do until I got a eGPU...

Froyok

We won't provide fixes for hardware we don't support unfortunately.