Substance Painter to Marmoset Roughness issue

Matthew Smith

I'm having an issue where my roughness map that is being generated from Substance Painter is way too reflective. Inside of Painter it looks great but when I bring it into Marmoset for some nicer renders it looks like crap. I'm pretty new to Marmoset (and Painter for that matter) but I feel like the roughness that is generated is too dark. I set the map to gloss and checked the invert box. Here are my results with both:



Hard to see without moving around it but here are the roughness maps for this material.



Why does the exported roughness have so much more contrast to it? I suppose I could just change some levels and make it look like I want it but should I need to do that? Help would be appreciated!

oblomov

This all comes down to color space mismatches.
In Designer, when looking at individual channels in solo mode, all channels are gamma comprensated. However, the roughness channel is exported in linear color space (as it should). Hence, when looking at your png file without compensation, it appears darker than in Designer. Similarly, when importing it in Toolbag you need to specify that it is in linear color space as well, otherwise Toolbag applies the inverse transformation and makes the roughness lower than it should be.

EarthQuake

By default gloss/roughness maps load into TB2 in linear space. To make sure, hit the options button next to the texture, sRGB should not be checked. To change it to gamma space, check the sRGB box.

Also, by default TB2 expects gloss maps to use white to define gloss areas and black to define rough areas. If your roughness map is authored so that black = glossy and white = rough, hit the invert check box.

There are also noticeable differences in lighting between your two screenshots, which likely accounts for a significant portion of the differences you're seeing.

Matthew Smith

oblomov wrote: »

This all comes down to color space mismatches.
In Designer, when looking at individual channels in solo mode, all channels are gamma comprensated. However, the roughness channel is exported in linear color space (as it should). Hence, when looking at your png file without compensation, it appears darker than in Designer. Similarly, when importing it in Toolbag you need to specify that it is in linear color space as well, otherwise Toolbag applies the inverse transformation and makes the roughness lower than it should be.

Hmmm, this looks like I'm going to have to do some research on this. I'm not sure I follow completely but it's basically a format issue. Like I said I'm new to Marmoset so I'm not sure which file types I should be using. I do have sRGB color space checked off and roughness map is set to L8 in Painter. I assume there isn't a be all and end all of solutions here so I'm going to have to learn HOW this works. In the mean time what file formats are typically used for this type of workflow? Clearly what I'm using isn't working. Any suggestions on where to find a good read on this?

Matthew Smith

Okay I think I figured it out. The files I was using seemed to be fine to work with. I simply did not turn on my metalness map. I guess I just assumed that if nothing was plugged into the reflectivity then it wouldn't matter. Anyway I'm happy and thank you all for trying to help a moron, haha.

EarthQuake

Oh yes that makes sense. Without a metalness map plugged in and with metalness set to 1, you're flagging the entire model as metallic, which used the albedo as the reflectivity and set the diffuse to black.

Stromberg90

I might be completely wrong with this, if someone could clarify this that would be great.

Do substance designer(painter) use the GGX specular shading model?
This will make a difference with the roughness/gloss map.

NicolasW

Stromberg90 wrote: »

I might be completely wrong with this, if someone could clarify this that would be great.

Do substance designer(painter) use the GGX specular shading model?
This will make a difference with the roughness/gloss map.

Yes, both SD and SP use the GGX brdf.