I was wondering as well if when the Megascans kick in, will they be better quality? Because the tiling on the ones that ship with DDO is quite bad... It's nearly unusable when you want to add a Dust layer and you're trying to scale the texture down and you've got these massive obvious repeating patterns in the texture. I just hope the tilling is gonna be better!
Although, the possibility to create our own materials is AMAZING! Making loads of nice materials!
@Hugojackson18 - In the full release of DDO all the materials will be updated and tile a lot better and the general quality will be higher! The currently available materials have a quite small sample size (1mx1m) because they are made for more detailed-texturing. It should be noted that for the Megascans library the minimal sample size is 2mx2m
Awesome to hear that you are making your own texture, you are more than welcome to send me a PM, it would be really awesome to see what you are making!
I honestly use DDO everyday on my job, and it runs smoothly on my Surface Pro 3. Higher quality megascans is the only think I'm asking and I'm so happy that they are coming! Keep on the good work guys!
I'll send you some of my materials! They are mainly guitar amps materials, but so much fun to make and use!
Being able to adjust where the Dynamask Editor pops up would be nice. For instance, if I click the mask button on a material layer the Dynamask editor opens up in the same place every time. If I have windows set up like I like them, I end up having to move the Dynamask editor back to the same spot every time I open it because when I click done it doesn't save the spot I closed it in. Just a minor thing, but it could be really nice.
There is a thing that always annoyed me in Quixel softwares, the "flip Y channel" or "flip X channel" option.
My point is : Yeah, I like to be able to flip the green channel for example. But flipping from what to what ?
I think xnormal have a very good thing for this, it shows exactly the direction of the channel : + or -. It's a lot easier in my mind.
I attached a picture for reference :
It would be cool to have a Save Project As button. My project just glitched out hard and now I'm debating whether to Save Project and reload to try and bug fix, or just to close it and start back from much earlier just so that I don't maybe accidentally save the error in. If I could save in iterations I could more easily deal with this.
Working a bit more today with it, I would really like an extra overall contral in the dynamask menu, that would do a general level on the total of the mask. That would be really hopeful!
Hello. I tried to look for problem I encountered and was surprised no one mentioned it before (or I am blind). I am working in 3DSMax and some presets were working weird for me.
I baked my maps with XYZ+. I have experience with nDO2 so there was no problem as far as tangent normal map goes, however object space nornmal map in my opinion need to have some adjustments as it comes from 3DSMax where y/z axies are switched and z is the one facing top.
What I did was to switch green and blue channel in my object normal map and than invert blue channel.
It would be super nice to have option while importing model to say if that comes from app that has Y or Z facing top. Exporting obj with flipped Y/Z dont work here as object space normals were already baked with wrong axis top.
Anyway after those tweaks smart materials like MUD FROM ABOVE works really sweet!! I am most impressed with QUIXEL SUITE!! Keep up the good work.
@Goeddy Yes I know this and that is my current workaround. But problem here is that 3dsmax has different coordinate systems you need to switch green/blue object space channels as well. Of course there is possibility that I am doing something terribly wrong here
It would be a nice feature (for me anyway) if there was a noise generator in the Dynamask editor. Something like the one in standard PS would be good with a few extra sliders like the other items do (Contrast, brightness, opacity). Alternatively or additionally a fractal pattern generator would be awesome. I don't know what language you guys write dDo in but I have a decent Diamond/square routine I wrote in C# I could share.
I would love if the old DDO filter masks were re-implemented and I wish you could use vector paths in the color id file, right not every time I input the color Id map and use a lower working resolution it mask extra layers were the downsizing of the map created a layer of all the edge pixels dithered when the map was made smaller
Really loving Quixel Suite, shame the beta is going to end soon, here are some suggestions to consider for the future.
1. DDO - Option to disable auto-updating of changes to materials.
Quite frequently I find myself wanting to add/remove/disable/enable a number of materials at the same time or various settings (e.g. dynamask). However currently after each action DDO will auto-update all the maps making the process take far longer than necessary. If I could disable auto-updates I could make several changes to multiple materials and then either enable auto-update afterwards or use a 'force-update' button to rebuild the maps.
For example say i have a collection of materials I'm testing out on an area of a mesh and I want to toggle one off and toggle another on. With auto-update I have to wait while DDO removes the first material from the intermediate maps, then I have to wait again when I enable the second material. This waiting time gets worse the more changes you want to make at one time before viewing the final results.
I read that that holding down alt while clicking should do this, but it doesn't seem to work for me and is not really a great solution. I'd much rather have a msall icon on the panel that toggles auto-updates on/off.
2. DDO - User defined Input Map settings - e.g. Object Space Normal directions and tangent space normal directions.
Whilst playing with DDO and creating a test model from scratch using Blender I ran into numerous problems related to Object Space Normal Maps (OSNM) due to the various co-ordinate systems being used in both 3D and 2D baked input maps. To complicate matters further as a freelancer developer I tend to be provided with 3D assets from clients using a variety of 3D apps and so the issues and concerns I ran into whilst trying to using Blender would seem to apply in general as well.
What I would like to see are per-project options for flipping tangent x and y as well as defining the components and directions they affect for object-space normals. I.e. being able to define which direction the r,g,b channels/components affect.
The problem is currently DDO only allows you to flip the y of tangents maps and that is only offered when you create a project, doesn't seem to be changable afterwards.
Blender has its own set of problems in this regard, its old renderer for baking objectSpace maps uses a non-user definable co-ordinate system for the colour components and directions. That means in DDO a blender Renderer objectSpaceMap has top/bottom = front/back, front/back = left/right etc, so basically the r,g,b components do not define the same directions as DDO uses. As for Blender Cycles it offers the ability to set the directions, but its objectspace baking is just completely broken and unusable as of 2.71.
Whilst one might argue you can fix these issues in the modeller, but as I alluded to above sometimes i'm just given assets from clients and going back and forth to try and get them to address/fix issues like these can be time consuming or simply impossible. Thus having DDO offer the ability to define or flip the various co-ordinate spaces for maps where it is appropriate would be most welcomed.
3. DDO - Duplicate Group
Doesn't seem to be a direct method to do this, though I did realise I could just turn it into a new smart material and then add it afterwards. Unsure whether that is better than allowing groups to be duplicated?
4. DDO - Copy & Paste Material layer
I sometimes find myself wanting to be able to copy a material layer, say from within a smart material and paste it into the root material list or another smart material. Doesn't appear to be any way to do this currently, although again I guess it could be turned into a smart material, but that feels rather roundabout and a sure way to fill up your presets folder with random materials.
5. DDO - Select Exporter Path and other path/folder selections
Is the a better way to set the path for exported maps? It uses Adobes 'select folder' dialog that always starts at the drive root location, making it a real pain to have to navigate to the folder to export to.
Would it not be possible to use a different mechanism to select the folder? Perhaps even a save file dialog and just lop of the filename to get the directory structure or even just use the project xml path and allow us to create new folders within it?
6. DDO - Copy a dynamask to another material
Would be nice to be able to copy the full dynamask settings from one material to another one. Note this is not the same as copying it between maps.
7. DDO - Tooltip to display source material name when hovering over its icon in the material list or dynamsk panel.
There are several places in DDO where I find myself having to click on a material or icon to open up the browser to see what the actual material is as the icon itself is unclear. Would save time if we could just hover mouse over the icon and a tooltip with the name of the source material popped up.
8. DDO - Option to set file dimensions at project creation or re-creation.
Currently it appears that DDO uses the largest source map dimension it finds as the overall dimension for the project. This is unhelpful and somewhat counter-intuitive as I figured it would either go off the ID map or choose the smallest map.
Being able to specify the dimension of the project would solve issues where input maps are different sizes or when you just want to create a project as a specific dimension.
9. DDO - Options to export maps without base layer
This probably needs a longer discussion to determine exactly what is required, but the main point is that for many of my projects I need to provide a means to dynamically adjust the base colour of material textures at runtime, to allow for user interaction.
Imagine an app that lets you design a robot, where you can choose 2 or 3 colours for different parts of its body. What I'd want in that case is to be able to export some specific combination of a maps photoshop layers that would enable me to 'inject' a base colour for albedo and specular. Obviously i'd have to combine these layers at runtime but that shouldn't be too hard.
9. Quixel Suite - Cache window/panel sizes and locations.
Gets quite annoying to constantly have to re-size and re-position windows/panels.
1.0 3DO Save/load settings including camera position
This would facilate being able to take consistent screenshots across a projects life time and between projects. Very useful for comparing before and after results.
2.0 User specified Screenshot Save Path
Currently screenshots are saved to the desktop (took me a while to find that out). Unfortunately on my system in order to see them often requires a refresh of the desktop. In addition as I don't want or need them on the desktop I'll move them to a folder that is on a different partition, often forgetting to 'move' and end up with a copy instead.
It would be beneficial to be able to specify a path for screenshots.
In the Dynamask editor for DDO it would be nice if there was an "Overall Blur" for the Post-Process filter at the bottom so I could lightly soften the entire mask, not just individual parts of it like the AO or Material IDs.
Guys.. this is stupid but.. can i suggest changing the background and the color of the fields? I can't read what this program is asking me.
I agree, I cannot read what is asked here. I have put in my key and everything, then it goes away. But this comes up every single time. Really frustrating.
There is only one thing that would make this program more than perfect in my eyes.
Making a plugin to connect Quixel with Photoshop to make a shortcut key that will allow the user to force refresh without going back to the window and clicking on the force refresh.
This would be a whole lot of work but would be great if ndo was not reliant on Photoshop. It could be quicker and easier to use and it would be possible to have a library of stock drag and drop normal stamps for kitbashing.
This is just feedback -- downloaded the new Suite a few minutes ago. My eyes popped at the added materials and options in DDO and NDO. Being introduced to these programs is a red-letter day, in my 3D life. :-) Thank you for all the hard work, Quixel!
It will be a really big and serious project that already beyond the scale of "suggestion for SUITE", but I think at the same time it will be a really important and valuable improvement for both Quixel and 3D Artists.
My suggestion is I wish I can ask Development Team to start to contact with Keyshot and Marmoset to discuss about a new Plugin that focused on provide a streamline Texturing workflow, offer a seamless transition between these amazing software.
My vision is to be able to combining ZBrush, Keyshot, Quixel and Marmoset together for a ultimate production tool-set.
For more specific explanation, when the model is finished or whenever I want to get myself a sneak peek to have a rough idea how my model will be in the actual render, I can export my mesh directly into Keyshot which is already confirmed in the upcoming release : ZBrush 4R7. After that, I wish I can have a interactive control to be able to apply, adjust, import and export the material & texture inside Quixel, Marmoset and Keyshot, without the time consuming file importing & exporting in our windows folder. It it more like considering Quixel itself as a plugin, like an extra material & texture library for Marmoset and Keyshot.
This is just because I'm more prefer to work with these software, in my opinion these software is perfectly match with each other, I understand there is a lot of Autodesk and the Foundry customer around, so it will not be a necessary decision unfortunately.
I hope my expression is clean enough to present my idea, if there is any unclean words that makes you confused, please tell me and I will try to answer that.
Hi, guys have you any plan add some specific output maps for dota 2 as are:
1. Color - In DDO Albedo
2. Normal Map - In DDO Normal
3. Mask 1
- (R) Channel - Detail Map - Specific for Dota
- (G) Channel - Diffuse Fresnel - Specific for Dota
- (B) Channel - Metalness - In DDO Metalness
- (A) Channel - Self Illumination - Specific for Dota
4. Mask 2
- (R) Channel - Specular Intensity - In DDO Specular
- (G) Channel - Diffuse Fresnel - Specific for Dota
- (B) Channel - Tint Specular by Color - Specific for Dota
- (A) Channel - Specular Exponent - In DDO Gloss
@jhaoshshin - We´re working hard to make the suite work as a plugin for other software, toolbag 2 for instance. You have given us some very interesting ideas to consider, thank you very much!
@PetSto - Dota 2 support is actually something we have looked in to and will implement in a very near realease and you have just made it so much easier for us! Thank you so much for taking the time to write those values!!
For high-poly models it would be nice to add ability to bake per vertex curvature map like in 3ds Max (through Render Surface Map command) or Substance Designer.
@jhaoshshin - We´re working hard to make the suite work as a plugin for other software, toolbag 2 for instance. You have given us some very interesting ideas to consider, thank you very much!
You are welcome, Quixel. I saw a huge potential future in Quixel, please keep it going!
The number "790" is visibly written on one of the two wood textures currently available (the rougher one) for DDO. The texture is great, but seeing this number on your mesh is really strange. It would be nice if you guys could remove it.
It would be great to be able to pause updates to photoshop. All too often I want to disable 3 layers in ddo, but have to wait while the texture refreshes in photoshop layer by layer. would be good to be able to make all my changes before reprocessing (or know where that feature is, if it exists already).
Replies
@Good suggestion! Will pass on to dev team!
Sorry if this is not the place to ask.
Quixel Standalone:
Any plan -in the development roadmap- to make Quixel as Standalone product ?
ty
Although, the possibility to create our own materials is AMAZING! Making loads of nice materials!
Awesome to hear that you are making your own texture, you are more than welcome to send me a PM, it would be really awesome to see what you are making!
I honestly use DDO everyday on my job, and it runs smoothly on my Surface Pro 3. Higher quality megascans is the only think I'm asking and I'm so happy that they are coming! Keep on the good work guys!
I'll send you some of my materials! They are mainly guitar amps materials, but so much fun to make and use!
My point is : Yeah, I like to be able to flip the green channel for example. But flipping from what to what ?
I think xnormal have a very good thing for this, it shows exactly the direction of the channel : + or -. It's a lot easier in my mind.
I attached a picture for reference :
@CJFerguson - The save system will be getting an overhaul in coming releases, "Save as" option is certainly one of the features
I baked my maps with XYZ+. I have experience with nDO2 so there was no problem as far as tangent normal map goes, however object space nornmal map in my opinion need to have some adjustments as it comes from 3DSMax where y/z axies are switched and z is the one facing top.
What I did was to switch green and blue channel in my object normal map and than invert blue channel.
It would be super nice to have option while importing model to say if that comes from app that has Y or Z facing top. Exporting obj with flipped Y/Z dont work here as object space normals were already baked with wrong axis top.
Anyway after those tweaks smart materials like MUD FROM ABOVE works really sweet!! I am most impressed with QUIXEL SUITE!! Keep up the good work.
you can still flip the channels in photoshop though. just in case u didnt know
1. DDO - Option to disable auto-updating of changes to materials.
Quite frequently I find myself wanting to add/remove/disable/enable a number of materials at the same time or various settings (e.g. dynamask). However currently after each action DDO will auto-update all the maps making the process take far longer than necessary. If I could disable auto-updates I could make several changes to multiple materials and then either enable auto-update afterwards or use a 'force-update' button to rebuild the maps.
For example say i have a collection of materials I'm testing out on an area of a mesh and I want to toggle one off and toggle another on. With auto-update I have to wait while DDO removes the first material from the intermediate maps, then I have to wait again when I enable the second material. This waiting time gets worse the more changes you want to make at one time before viewing the final results.
I read that that holding down alt while clicking should do this, but it doesn't seem to work for me and is not really a great solution. I'd much rather have a msall icon on the panel that toggles auto-updates on/off.
2. DDO - User defined Input Map settings - e.g. Object Space Normal directions and tangent space normal directions.
Whilst playing with DDO and creating a test model from scratch using Blender I ran into numerous problems related to Object Space Normal Maps (OSNM) due to the various co-ordinate systems being used in both 3D and 2D baked input maps. To complicate matters further as a freelancer developer I tend to be provided with 3D assets from clients using a variety of 3D apps and so the issues and concerns I ran into whilst trying to using Blender would seem to apply in general as well.
What I would like to see are per-project options for flipping tangent x and y as well as defining the components and directions they affect for object-space normals. I.e. being able to define which direction the r,g,b channels/components affect.
The problem is currently DDO only allows you to flip the y of tangents maps and that is only offered when you create a project, doesn't seem to be changable afterwards.
Blender has its own set of problems in this regard, its old renderer for baking objectSpace maps uses a non-user definable co-ordinate system for the colour components and directions. That means in DDO a blender Renderer objectSpaceMap has top/bottom = front/back, front/back = left/right etc, so basically the r,g,b components do not define the same directions as DDO uses. As for Blender Cycles it offers the ability to set the directions, but its objectspace baking is just completely broken and unusable as of 2.71.
Whilst one might argue you can fix these issues in the modeller, but as I alluded to above sometimes i'm just given assets from clients and going back and forth to try and get them to address/fix issues like these can be time consuming or simply impossible. Thus having DDO offer the ability to define or flip the various co-ordinate spaces for maps where it is appropriate would be most welcomed.
3. DDO - Duplicate Group
Doesn't seem to be a direct method to do this, though I did realise I could just turn it into a new smart material and then add it afterwards. Unsure whether that is better than allowing groups to be duplicated?
4. DDO - Copy & Paste Material layer
I sometimes find myself wanting to be able to copy a material layer, say from within a smart material and paste it into the root material list or another smart material. Doesn't appear to be any way to do this currently, although again I guess it could be turned into a smart material, but that feels rather roundabout and a sure way to fill up your presets folder with random materials.
5. DDO - Select Exporter Path and other path/folder selections
Is the a better way to set the path for exported maps? It uses Adobes 'select folder' dialog that always starts at the drive root location, making it a real pain to have to navigate to the folder to export to.
Would it not be possible to use a different mechanism to select the folder? Perhaps even a save file dialog and just lop of the filename to get the directory structure or even just use the project xml path and allow us to create new folders within it?
6. DDO - Copy a dynamask to another material
Would be nice to be able to copy the full dynamask settings from one material to another one. Note this is not the same as copying it between maps.
7. DDO - Tooltip to display source material name when hovering over its icon in the material list or dynamsk panel.
There are several places in DDO where I find myself having to click on a material or icon to open up the browser to see what the actual material is as the icon itself is unclear. Would save time if we could just hover mouse over the icon and a tooltip with the name of the source material popped up.
8. DDO - Option to set file dimensions at project creation or re-creation.
Currently it appears that DDO uses the largest source map dimension it finds as the overall dimension for the project. This is unhelpful and somewhat counter-intuitive as I figured it would either go off the ID map or choose the smallest map.
Being able to specify the dimension of the project would solve issues where input maps are different sizes or when you just want to create a project as a specific dimension.
9. DDO - Options to export maps without base layer
This probably needs a longer discussion to determine exactly what is required, but the main point is that for many of my projects I need to provide a means to dynamically adjust the base colour of material textures at runtime, to allow for user interaction.
Imagine an app that lets you design a robot, where you can choose 2 or 3 colours for different parts of its body. What I'd want in that case is to be able to export some specific combination of a maps photoshop layers that would enable me to 'inject' a base colour for albedo and specular. Obviously i'd have to combine these layers at runtime but that shouldn't be too hard.
9. Quixel Suite - Cache window/panel sizes and locations.
Gets quite annoying to constantly have to re-size and re-position windows/panels.
1.0 3DO Save/load settings including camera position
This would facilate being able to take consistent screenshots across a projects life time and between projects. Very useful for comparing before and after results.
2.0 User specified Screenshot Save Path
Currently screenshots are saved to the desktop (took me a while to find that out). Unfortunately on my system in order to see them often requires a refresh of the desktop. In addition as I don't want or need them on the desktop I'll move them to a folder that is on a different partition, often forgetting to 'move' and end up with a copy instead.
It would be beneficial to be able to specify a path for screenshots.
I agree, I cannot read what is asked here. I have put in my key and everything, then it goes away. But this comes up every single time. Really frustrating.
Making a plugin to connect Quixel with Photoshop to make a shortcut key that will allow the user to force refresh without going back to the window and clicking on the force refresh.
That would be perfection.
It will be a really big and serious project that already beyond the scale of "suggestion for SUITE", but I think at the same time it will be a really important and valuable improvement for both Quixel and 3D Artists.
My suggestion is I wish I can ask Development Team to start to contact with Keyshot and Marmoset to discuss about a new Plugin that focused on provide a streamline Texturing workflow, offer a seamless transition between these amazing software.
My vision is to be able to combining ZBrush, Keyshot, Quixel and Marmoset together for a ultimate production tool-set.
For more specific explanation, when the model is finished or whenever I want to get myself a sneak peek to have a rough idea how my model will be in the actual render, I can export my mesh directly into Keyshot which is already confirmed in the upcoming release : ZBrush 4R7. After that, I wish I can have a interactive control to be able to apply, adjust, import and export the material & texture inside Quixel, Marmoset and Keyshot, without the time consuming file importing & exporting in our windows folder. It it more like considering Quixel itself as a plugin, like an extra material & texture library for Marmoset and Keyshot.
This is just because I'm more prefer to work with these software, in my opinion these software is perfectly match with each other, I understand there is a lot of Autodesk and the Foundry customer around, so it will not be a necessary decision unfortunately.
I hope my expression is clean enough to present my idea, if there is any unclean words that makes you confused, please tell me and I will try to answer that.
1. Color - In DDO Albedo
2. Normal Map - In DDO Normal
3. Mask 1
- (R) Channel - Detail Map - Specific for Dota
- (G) Channel - Diffuse Fresnel - Specific for Dota
- (B) Channel - Metalness - In DDO Metalness
- (A) Channel - Self Illumination - Specific for Dota
4. Mask 2
- (R) Channel - Specular Intensity - In DDO Specular
- (G) Channel - Diffuse Fresnel - Specific for Dota
- (B) Channel - Tint Specular by Color - Specific for Dota
- (A) Channel - Specular Exponent - In DDO Gloss
Marmoset Toolbag 2 already supported Dota 2 template.
And calibration profile will has this rules:
If map isnt present result will be pure black color.
1. Color - if not present then result will be RGB(128,128,128)
- if AO Map is present then combined with Color with blend Overlay
2. Normal - RGB - if not present then result will be RGB(128,128,255)
@PetSto - Dota 2 support is actually something we have looked in to and will implement in a very near realease and you have just made it so much easier for us! Thank you so much for taking the time to write those values!!
You are welcome, Quixel. I saw a huge potential future in Quixel, please keep it going!
- Name
- Organisation
- Serial Number
It also would be great if the material settings menus could be a tab on the same sidebar as swatches and border styles.
Cheers