Ok, it looks bad because it is set to color and is treated as a 8bit image.
You should set your fxnmap to be greyscale and set it to absolute 16 bits in its global parameters.
Also to transform it into a normal map, you can simply use the Normal filter in the space bar menu instead of that complicated setup.
Is there a way to type in a value into a parameter? Like I want size of a pattern to be exact, but there's only a slider...
Also, in fx map pattern size, how can I make it bigger than 1x1?
I don't do any 2D-fixing up on the bakes either. Honestly it comes out fine; I don't think I ever managed to get my cage bakes 100% error-free either (if you look at some of my older work, like the Dozer you can probably see small things here and there), and doing things cageless takes a lot less time for the same result. Baking and cage tweaking used to be my biggest time sink you know.
Most important thing is that the 'ray cast splits on hard edges' problem doesn't happen with proper baking software. If you use some old school method like Max then you have to use a cage of course, but Substance Designer just treats hard edges as soft ones for the raycasting only.
Is there a way to type in a value into a parameter? Like I want size of a pattern to be exact, but there's only a slider...
Also, in fx map pattern size, how can I make it bigger than 1x1?
You can double click on any slider to type in a value. You can type a value that's greater than the default max value too.
+1 blown mind here. What programs besides Substance can be considered "proper" bakers?
Hah, afaik, none other than the in-house tool Splash Damage had. There was talk one time about maybe going public, but the guy who made it left so that will probably not happen.
Designer is already ahead of all other publicly available bakers IMO, and if they did some more changes here and there they could really be the only properly featured one out there.
If you're not using Deisgner yet to bake, here's some more arguments:
One-click rebake if you update your meshes + instant reload and apply to your texture. There's nothing faster than this, thanks to it being baker + texturer + viewer in one.
The padding is not like common edge-padding; it blurs and fades from the edges, with the advantage of making small baking errors much less visible. Much faster to get a good bake since you don't have to fix every single ray miss; it just fills it up with surrounding pixel values, which looks totally acceptable.
It can bake AO from lowpoly, but with normalmap. No other baker does this except for Vray in 3DS Max. Advantage is you don't have to do 2 AO bakes (HP projection + Lp un-exploded).
Baking AO maps from low poly + normal map is awesome! The result is not as smooth as something xNormal would bake with high quality settings but it works most of the time.
Since it only takes a couple of seconds to bake, it is truly a huge time saver.
Small sneak peek of the PSD export coming up in 4.4
Support for an unlimited number of layers from any node in the graph. The PSD can be customized with layer groups, masks, blending modes, etc.
All these settings are saved with the substance for easy reexport.
So I have a couple of problems (likely something I am doing wrong).
First one, what is the correct way to combine normals? As you can see from the image when I try to use two different normal combines something crazy happens. (Note: I only used the two combines to show both ways).
Second one, I went back to rebake normals and using a cage my bake turns out like this:
I can bake cageless and it comes out basically normal, there are just some baking errors. Also, I can bake the same LP/Cage/HP in XNormal and it comes out fine.
While I am asking, I thought I saw the answer to this somewhere, but, in the 3D previewer my model is showing up black how do you fix that?
Your first screenshot looks like you tried to bland something that wasn't a tangent space normal map. What is your second input to these normal blend and normal combine nodes?
On the second screenshot, it seems you baked a world space normal map. Are you sure you had your settings set up to Tangent space when you baked? If you had, there might be a bug when using a cage. Could you send me your meshes for me to take a look?
Your first screenshot looks like you tried to bland something that wasn't a tangent space normal map. What is your second input to these normal blend and normal combine nodes?
On the second screenshot, it seems you baked a world space normal map. Are you sure you had your settings set up to Tangent space when you baked? If you had, there might be a bug when using a cage. Could you send me your meshes for me to take a look?
Okay your first response fixed my first question. I wasn't trying to output normals on to that section. So I just output normal color and all is fine.
To your second response, if you look at the screen shot I have tangent space selected for my normal map in the settings screen on the left. I can literally take those some settings and untick use cage and it comes out like it is supposed to (minus some baking errors). I will send you a private message with a link to download my files.
Hah, afaik, none other than the in-house tool Splash Damage had. There was talk one time about maybe going public, but the guy who made it left so that will probably not happen.
Designer is already ahead of all other publicly available bakers IMO, and if they did some more changes here and there they could really be the only properly featured one out there.
If you're not using Deisgner yet to bake, here's some more arguments:
One-click rebake if you update your meshes + instant reload and apply to your texture. There's nothing faster than this, thanks to it being baker + texturer + viewer in one.
The padding is not like common edge-padding; it blurs and fades from the edges, with the advantage of making small baking errors much less visible. Much faster to get a good bake since you don't have to fix every single ray miss; it just fills it up with surrounding pixel values, which looks totally acceptable.
It can bake AO from lowpoly, but with normalmap. No other baker does this except for Vray in 3DS Max. Advantage is you don't have to do 2 AO bakes (HP projection + Lp un-exploded).
Amazing, thanks for the breakdown, will try all that stuff as soon as I get the chance.
Also, the speed which the guys at Allegorithmic spits out updates is killer, good to see such a powerful program improving so fast.
Is it normal that I get normal map seams when baking with cage? My mesh has smoothing groups for every island for hard edges. It looks like this http://imgur.com/a/mqhs0
Is it normal that I get normal map seams when baking with cage? My mesh has smoothing groups for every island for hard edges. It looks like this http://imgur.com/a/mqhs0
Does your cage have averaged normals (i.e. 1 smoothing group) for the whole mesh? It needs that, otherwise you'll get projection gaps.
In any case I believe SD has an option for averaging normals on the cage, if I remember correctly. Does this help?
Does your cage have averaged normals (i.e. 1 smoothing group) for the whole mesh? It needs that, otherwise you'll get projection gaps.
In any case I believe SD has an option for averaging normals on the cage, if I remember correctly. Does this help?
I tried with a few different assets and it's always the same result. I do use a proper averaged cage.
Same mesh\cage\highpoly. One is baked and viewed in Xnormal\Marmoset and the other is baked and viewed in Substance Designer. Same baking settings and image format. Different results... http://imgur.com/a/NNF8P
@SuperFranky How much padding is there between your UV islands? I believe that might contribute to your problem?
Also for anyone who uses Substance Designer...how would I make a cavity map?
Atm I'm just using a levels node on my AO bake but I imagine there is a better way?
@SuperFranky How much padding is there between your UV islands? I believe that might contribute to your problem?
I don't think I saw a padding option in substance baker anywhere. I packed my UVs with a good amount of padding between shells(16px for 2k map, I think). Maybe my UVs aren't good enough too.
I don't think I saw a padding option in substance baker anywhere. I packed my UVs with a good amount of padding between shells(16px for 2k map, I think). Maybe my UVs aren't good enough too.
Also, on the material settings, depending on the shader you're using, there's a normal map intensity slider. If it's anything other than 1 you'll get mismatches on island splits.
By looking at the normal map texture itself, can you notice differences between the one you baked in SD and one in xNormal? I did have a issue baking with a cage in SD, so on my latest asset I've done it cageless and it worked perfectly.
Also, on the material settings, depending on the shader you're using, there's a normal map intensity slider. If it's anything other than 1 you'll get mismatches on island splits.
By looking at the normal map texture itself, can you notice differences between the one you baked in SD and one in xNormal? I did have a issue baking with a cage in SD, so on my latest asset I've done it cageless and it worked perfectly.
http://imgur.com/a/RKEx8 http://imgur.com/a/KruYv
another test. The result is just so much nicer with Xnormal bake. Less weird artifacts and stuff. Maybe it is a padding issue, but with physically based shader in Substance you can't change normal intensity...
Interestingly, there's no visual difference when baking with or without a cage in Substance. It feels like Cage baking doesn't work at all. Or maybe it's incompatible with workflow (Smoothing groups for hard edges+ averaged cage).
Also, I can't understand for the life of me how to get xnormal bakes working in Substance Designer.
There's a built in cavity map from normals node. it works really well.
I've been looking for this and haven't seen it... Under filters->effects I have ao, curvature, emoss with gloss, glow, mosaic, shadows, uber emboss. I also tried searching cavity map, with no success.
Also any chance on releasing a Substance version of your shader?
@superfranky
If you don't mind uploading your mesh, I can try to see if I can get some decent bakes for you. It's hard to tell without actually messing with it. I've used both xnormal and SD for bakes and haven't had much issues.
@Jerc
I tried looking for the Dota2 shader today and noticed it no longer works with SD. Any chance on an update?
@superfranky
If you don't mind uploading your mesh, I can try to see if I can get some decent bakes for you. It's hard to tell without actually messing with it. I've used both xnormal and SD for bakes and haven't had much issues.
So, after a lot of time spending on tests I figured out that there is nothing wrong with bakes at all. It's just Substance Designer that is displaying UV seams as a those ugly black lines. Looks like I'll have to ignore them or view my meshes in Marmoset from now on... I hope it gets fixed in future updates.
If I understand correctly you'll get the best results by using your models stored tangent basis (ala explicit normals in UDK).
You can't do this with OBJ, right? Don't you HAVE to use FBX to store that data and move it between apps/engines?
I (still) haven't tried baking with SD yet, but I fully intended on using FBX format and making sure my tangents/bi-normals were exported with FBX, triangulating my mesh, etc.
If I understand correctly you'll get the best results by using your models stored tangent basis (ala explicit normals in UDK).
You can't do this with OBJ, right? Don't you HAVE to use FBX to store that data and move it between apps/engines?
I (still) haven't tried baking with SD yet, but I fully intended on using FBX format and making sure my tangents/bi-normals were exported with FBX, triangulating my mesh, etc.
FBX or not makes no difference for Designer. And there's no point in triangulating anything if you bake and view an asset in the same engine.
Just for your information, OBJ or FBX can actually make a difference in general (maybe not for the present problem, but anyway). If you've not set the option in the preferences to recompute the tangents, SD will use the tangent from the FBX for both the display and the normal map computation. Doing this will ensure your normal map and tangents to be synchronized.
When you use OBJ, the tangents will be recomputed by SD (because the obj format does not store this information), the tangent basis in this case will the same as Unity.
Back to the initial problem, we've asked you the assets on our forum to investigate the problem.
Just for your information, OBJ or FBX can actually make a difference in general (maybe not for the present problem, but anyway). If you've not set the option in the preferences to recompute the tangents, SD will use the tangent from the FBX for both the display and the normal map computation. Doing this will ensure your normal map and tangents to be synchronized.
When you use OBJ, the tangents will be recomputed by SD (because the obj format does not store this information), the tangent basis in this case will the same as Unity.
Back to the initial problem, we've asked you the assets on our forum to investigate the problem.
So how to properly export mesh in fbx format from 3ds max?
Hey guys, I've been having some random crashes on the last couple versions of SD. Do you get those as well? I can't get a solid repro, they just seem random. Sometimes when I double click on some node, sometimes it happens without me touching anything. Any ideas?
SuperFranky: I think you just need to make sure Tangents and Bi-Normals are exported.
I have a bug to report:
If you have a mask applied to a layer in your PSD, it won't get imported properly. It does some weird resize thing. I have screenshots showing what I mean. http://imgur.com/a/DrsWP
This is easily worked around by 'applying' the mask to the layer yourself before importing the PSD...just wanted to report it.
I've been looking for this and haven't seen it... Under filters->effects I have ao, curvature, emoss with gloss, glow, mosaic, shadows, uber emboss. I also tried searching cavity map, with no success.
Also any chance on releasing a Substance version of your shader?
Curvature with some levels (pull the grey up to white) = Cavity
And re. my shader = no real point I think, this PBR stuff works well enough out of the box I think, no?
Im having some issues withn my current Substance. What I am currently doing is:
- Inverting the base color of my diffuse in my specular
- Color blending it over my base spec value
My issue here is - I want to limit the lightness (B value if it was Photoshop HSB or L value as in substance HSL) to a maximum value. I want the final blend to never reach a higher lightness value than that of my base spec value.
Is there a way to color blend a A over B then limit output lightness value to X where X is the lightness value of B?
What I get now is that I can in single cases go in and add a levels node or HSL not and set this to be correct per color version of my material. But it would be great if I could create a graph that manages this for me in a automatic manner. Somthing like a node that just can limit lightness to X. In photoshop I would have something that limits HSB B-value to X%
Hey guys, I've been having some random crashes on the last couple versions of SD. Do you get those as well? I can't get a solid repro, they just seem random. Sometimes when I double click on some node, sometimes it happens without me touching anything. Any ideas?
We also have identified some random crash, next week is entirely dedicated to debug, hopefully it'll be fixed in the next version.
I have a bug to report:
If you have a mask applied to a layer in your PSD, it won't get imported properly. It does some weird resize thing. I have screenshots showing what I mean. http://imgur.com/a/DrsWP
Have you checked the "full frame" option in the PSD import dialog ?
Otherwise can you send me the psd ?
Thanks!
So how to properly export mesh in fbx format from 3ds max?
Indeed, just make sure you export the tangent and bi normals when exporting to fbx.
Is there a way to exclusively select a node output from a material blend? Sometimes I try to connect an output to something that isn't an output node and it select something I don't want to.
Is there a way to exclusively select a node output from a material blend? Sometimes I try to connect an output to something that isn't an output node and it select something I don't want to.
I have small question, does the position slider in the Histogram scan node and the level in low slider in the levels node basically do the same thing? Im confused as to which one is better to use for creating damage transitions.
Im having some issues withn my current Substance. What I am currently doing is:
- Inverting the base color of my diffuse in my specular
- Color blending it over my base spec value
My issue here is - I want to limit the lightness (B value if it was Photoshop HSB or L value as in substance HSL) to a maximum value. I want the final blend to never reach a higher lightness value than that of my base spec value.
Is there a way to color blend a A over B then limit output lightness value to X where X is the lightness value of B?
What I get now is that I can in single cases go in and add a levels node or HSL not and set this to be correct per color version of my material. But it would be great if I could create a graph that manages this for me in a automatic manner. Somthing like a node that just can limit lightness to X. In photoshop I would have something that limits HSB B-value to X%
Try using the blend node with the blending mode set to "minimum". This will output whichever value is darker.
I have small question, does the position slider in the Histogram scan node and the level in low slider in the levels node basically do the same thing? Im confused as to which one is better to use for creating damage transitions.
At Position = 0, Level in Low = 1 / Level in High = 1
At Position = 0.5, Level in Low = 0 / Level in High = 1
At Position = 1, Level in Low = 0 / Level in High = 0
The nice thing about the histogram scan is that you get a full black image at 0 and a full white image at 1, very usefull for blending.
Cool stuff guys.
I guess I'll share some of my filters and textures too.
This one is some kind of rock texture generator, you can easily swap out the normal map and AO bakes for it to adapt to new geometry.
Replies
Also, in fx map pattern size, how can I make it bigger than 1x1?
+1 blown mind here. What programs besides Substance can be considered "proper" bakers?
You can double click on any slider to type in a value. You can type a value that's greater than the default max value too.
Hah, afaik, none other than the in-house tool Splash Damage had. There was talk one time about maybe going public, but the guy who made it left so that will probably not happen.
Designer is already ahead of all other publicly available bakers IMO, and if they did some more changes here and there they could really be the only properly featured one out there.
If you're not using Deisgner yet to bake, here's some more arguments:
One-click rebake if you update your meshes + instant reload and apply to your texture. There's nothing faster than this, thanks to it being baker + texturer + viewer in one.
The padding is not like common edge-padding; it blurs and fades from the edges, with the advantage of making small baking errors much less visible. Much faster to get a good bake since you don't have to fix every single ray miss; it just fills it up with surrounding pixel values, which looks totally acceptable.
It can bake AO from lowpoly, but with normalmap. No other baker does this except for Vray in 3DS Max. Advantage is you don't have to do 2 AO bakes (HP projection + Lp un-exploded).
Since it only takes a couple of seconds to bake, it is truly a huge time saver.
Support for an unlimited number of layers from any node in the graph. The PSD can be customized with layer groups, masks, blending modes, etc.
All these settings are saved with the substance for easy reexport.
First one, what is the correct way to combine normals? As you can see from the image when I try to use two different normal combines something crazy happens. (Note: I only used the two combines to show both ways).
Second one, I went back to rebake normals and using a cage my bake turns out like this:
I can bake cageless and it comes out basically normal, there are just some baking errors. Also, I can bake the same LP/Cage/HP in XNormal and it comes out fine.
While I am asking, I thought I saw the answer to this somewhere, but, in the 3D previewer my model is showing up black how do you fix that?
Thanks ahead of time!
On the second screenshot, it seems you baked a world space normal map. Are you sure you had your settings set up to Tangent space when you baked? If you had, there might be a bug when using a cage. Could you send me your meshes for me to take a look?
Okay your first response fixed my first question. I wasn't trying to output normals on to that section. So I just output normal color and all is fine.
To your second response, if you look at the screen shot I have tangent space selected for my normal map in the settings screen on the left. I can literally take those some settings and untick use cage and it comes out like it is supposed to (minus some baking errors). I will send you a private message with a link to download my files.
Thank you!
Amazing, thanks for the breakdown, will try all that stuff as soon as I get the chance.
Also, the speed which the guys at Allegorithmic spits out updates is killer, good to see such a powerful program improving so fast.
Does your cage have averaged normals (i.e. 1 smoothing group) for the whole mesh? It needs that, otherwise you'll get projection gaps.
In any case I believe SD has an option for averaging normals on the cage, if I remember correctly. Does this help?
I tried with a few different assets and it's always the same result. I do use a proper averaged cage.
Same mesh\cage\highpoly. One is baked and viewed in Xnormal\Marmoset and the other is baked and viewed in Substance Designer. Same baking settings and image format. Different results...
http://imgur.com/a/NNF8P
Also for anyone who uses Substance Designer...how would I make a cavity map?
Atm I'm just using a levels node on my AO bake but I imagine there is a better way?
Also, on the material settings, depending on the shader you're using, there's a normal map intensity slider. If it's anything other than 1 you'll get mismatches on island splits.
By looking at the normal map texture itself, can you notice differences between the one you baked in SD and one in xNormal? I did have a issue baking with a cage in SD, so on my latest asset I've done it cageless and it worked perfectly.
http://imgur.com/a/KruYv
another test. The result is just so much nicer with Xnormal bake. Less weird artifacts and stuff. Maybe it is a padding issue, but with physically based shader in Substance you can't change normal intensity...
Interestingly, there's no visual difference when baking with or without a cage in Substance. It feels like Cage baking doesn't work at all. Or maybe it's incompatible with workflow (Smoothing groups for hard edges+ averaged cage).
Also, I can't understand for the life of me how to get xnormal bakes working in Substance Designer.
I've been looking for this and haven't seen it... Under filters->effects I have ao, curvature, emoss with gloss, glow, mosaic, shadows, uber emboss. I also tried searching cavity map, with no success.
Also any chance on releasing a Substance version of your shader?
@superfranky
If you don't mind uploading your mesh, I can try to see if I can get some decent bakes for you. It's hard to tell without actually messing with it. I've used both xnormal and SD for bakes and haven't had much issues.
@Jerc
I tried looking for the Dota2 shader today and noticed it no longer works with SD. Any chance on an update?
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B02lElvs8BcvSFZvUV9vRVc2aUU&usp=sharing
Here are all my meshes. Thanks for helping me
sorry but I'm headed out of town this weekend. I thought I'd get to look before heading out, but I'll look at it on Monday. Thanks.
If I understand correctly you'll get the best results by using your models stored tangent basis (ala explicit normals in UDK).
You can't do this with OBJ, right? Don't you HAVE to use FBX to store that data and move it between apps/engines?
I (still) haven't tried baking with SD yet, but I fully intended on using FBX format and making sure my tangents/bi-normals were exported with FBX, triangulating my mesh, etc.
When you use OBJ, the tangents will be recomputed by SD (because the obj format does not store this information), the tangent basis in this case will the same as Unity.
Back to the initial problem, we've asked you the assets on our forum to investigate the problem.
I have a bug to report:
If you have a mask applied to a layer in your PSD, it won't get imported properly. It does some weird resize thing. I have screenshots showing what I mean. http://imgur.com/a/DrsWP
This is easily worked around by 'applying' the mask to the layer yourself before importing the PSD...just wanted to report it.
Curvature with some levels (pull the grey up to white) = Cavity
And re. my shader = no real point I think, this PBR stuff works well enough out of the box I think, no?
- Inverting the base color of my diffuse in my specular
- Color blending it over my base spec value
My issue here is - I want to limit the lightness (B value if it was Photoshop HSB or L value as in substance HSL) to a maximum value. I want the final blend to never reach a higher lightness value than that of my base spec value.
Is there a way to color blend a A over B then limit output lightness value to X where X is the lightness value of B?
What I get now is that I can in single cases go in and add a levels node or HSL not and set this to be correct per color version of my material. But it would be great if I could create a graph that manages this for me in a automatic manner. Somthing like a node that just can limit lightness to X. In photoshop I would have something that limits HSB B-value to X%
We also have identified some random crash, next week is entirely dedicated to debug, hopefully it'll be fixed in the next version.
Have you checked the "full frame" option in the PSD import dialog ?
Otherwise can you send me the psd ?
Thanks!
Indeed, just make sure you export the tangent and bi normals when exporting to fbx.
Thanks for the cavity tip!
As far as your shader there are some things missing from the substance pbr:
1. No rim light
2. No SSS
3. No Opacity
I'm sure there are more, but these are what come to mind.
I unfortunately haven't actually gotten to try your shader - I used XSI then Modo, but I've heard great things about it.
Are you talking about this ?
For example, I want to add this
to one of the PBR material nodes from the library?
What is the process of adding decals to materials?
Here is the bake I got with just default settings.... looks good imo.
I'm not sure why you're having issues. It's kinda strange. You may try turning off yebis and baking.
Try using the blend node with the blending mode set to "minimum". This will output whichever value is darker.
At Position = 0, Level in Low = 1 / Level in High = 1
At Position = 0.5, Level in Low = 0 / Level in High = 1
At Position = 1, Level in Low = 0 / Level in High = 0
The nice thing about the histogram scan is that you get a full black image at 0 and a full white image at 1, very usefull for blending.