Convert PBR to Metalness
I've found a few posts about people struggling with this in the Support thread, but I'm curious if there's been any 'official' word on this since. I assumed I'd be able to, now that the calibration settings are in, to load up a set of PBR maps and save them out into a metalness profile, but this doesn't seem to work. At least, it seems like it's an issue when the original project files no longer exist and you just want to load up and re-export previously exported files.
Is this something currently lacking, or is there something I am doing wrong in my process?
Is this something currently lacking, or is there something I am doing wrong in my process?
Replies
This can be very useful but i think its not possible at the moment. You can always re-process your mesh using dDo from the start and set the correct calibration profile you can always give a try to those inputs maps"see image" and for your metalness, the map must be only black/white so no calibration there... i think !
Hope it help.
It works alright if the original map did not have metals in it - I can, indeed, just re-use the albedo with a black metalness map and the existing gloss map and that's generally okay. The problem really is in converting a material that does have metals in it, in which case it would be quite nice for Quixel to be able to generate metalness and metalness albedo based on the existing specular and albedo maps.
When you load up a normal project with specular/gloss/albedo, conversion is fairly straightforward. You can just add a metalness map and a metalness albedo map and it will create those correctly based on your current settings and layers, and then you can export to a metalness workflow such as for UE4 without any issues.
Unfortunately though, it doesn't seem like it affords the same type of conversions that it performs with its own materials to the base maps. As such if you load up just a set of base maps rather than existing project, when you create metalness maps they just contain copies of the albedo rather than correctly converting the data.
Obviously, albedo/specular to albedo/metalness is not a one-to-one conversion, but Quixel does this already with its own materials. It seems that one way to get around this is to use your base maps to create a material definition and then add that material to a new DDO project with metalness - in that case it will do the job and create the appropriate maps for them automatically. It would be nice if it did the same when they're just imported as base maps.