ANSWERED: Please explain structure of main DDO layers - Mat/Mask/Reflectance
polycounter lvl 7
Sorry for may be stupid questions. But here's what I can't understand yet:
1. Speaking of attached pic example, the very first layer is blue "Paint", ok.. if it's paint.. why it has "Grainy metal" material in it's first (material) slot? Isn't it supposed to be the Paint only cos we won't actually see any metal beneath it as it is all covered with paint. All the scratches are added later on a second layer "Scratches"..
2. I am a little confused. The third slot "Reflectance" - is it for changing the color of particular area of my albedo map (let's say if I want red colored car paint instead of blue) or is it for just setting correct reflectance values? And how to change the color while leaving the reflectance values correct?
Thanks!
1. Speaking of attached pic example, the very first layer is blue "Paint", ok.. if it's paint.. why it has "Grainy metal" material in it's first (material) slot? Isn't it supposed to be the Paint only cos we won't actually see any metal beneath it as it is all covered with paint. All the scratches are added later on a second layer "Scratches"..
2. I am a little confused. The third slot "Reflectance" - is it for changing the color of particular area of my albedo map (let's say if I want red colored car paint instead of blue) or is it for just setting correct reflectance values? And how to change the color while leaving the reflectance values correct?
Thanks!
Replies
1) There are more smart materials than actual scanned texture patterns in the suite, and sometimes certain textures get "re-purposed" to different uses.
Simply speaking, the PBR character of your texture comes predominantly from the specular and gloss values, so if you're so inclined you could take a wood base material and tweak the spec and gloss to look like metal.
In this case, grainy metal becomes metallic paint - it's a bit of a hybrid material in real life, being composed of tiny metal flakes and some acrylic parts, on in a PBR environment it can still be treated technically as metal.
This smart material uses the grainy metal so it can use the noisy base texture and normals from it, but then tweaked the color and spec and gloss to look like metallic paint.
So to the question, the first layer is actually paint by appearance, it just uses grainy metal to create that look.
Hope this makes sense.
2) The term "Reflectance" might be a bit confusing - it just means the base color/value of whatever is visible of your current layer (unmasked).
For albedo that is your base color, so yes, if you want red car paint you change the reflectance swatch in your albedo slot.
Gloss and Specular are unaffected if you only change the "reflectance" in your albedo channel.
Another nice thing you can try is:
right-click on the reflectance swatch and you get a pop-up of calibrated PBR values for a variety of real-life materials.
But be aware that this will actually change the values for all your maps, including spec/gloss.
It's one of those things where you have to know the rules (in this case PBR values mostly) so you can bend them.
As an example:
In the suite there are currently 11 different metal materials, but a ton more metal SMART materials.
The materials in essence are just patterns with some surface detail, normals and some spec/gloss details, but the real magic happens when you change the reflectance values in the Suite.
That's how you can turn the Aluminum material into chrome, just by changing gloss and specular and toning down the texture intensity.
The best way to understand those things is to just analyze smart materials and see what makes them tick.
And yet, I didn't even get a reply to my megascans beta application...:poly124:
Hopefully when the beta goes public we will see fat sonic covered with glorious Megascans!