3d Max - Vray - Quixel Workflow

ryanonline

Can someone show me a set-up of Quixel textures correctly applied to a v-ray material?  So the Albedo, Specular, Gloss, Normal and Bump. I know where most of them go but often get confused because they have different names. So for Instance:

Albedo > Diffuse
Bump > Maps/Standard/Normal Bump/Flip Green (y)

I've seen this question asked a bunch of times, but no clear answer.  Anyone care to help?

Cheers.

Synaesthesia

Hey Ryan!

I've moved this discussion to Technical Talk. You'll have a wider audience for your question here. I unfortunately do not know enough about VRay to advise you, but I believe many people here will.

musashidan

Does QS have a vray preset that converts metal/rough maps to vray material maps? Or are you using a spec/gloss setup in QS.

In Vray spec would be reflection, gloss would be reflection glossiness.

Substance Painter, for instance, uses offline renderer(vray/arnold/etc) presets to convert the metal/rough data to maps that suit the vray material. The key map  being fresnel ior. So the preset outputs these maps in order to recreate the shader:

Diffuse
Reflection
Reflection glossiness
Fresnel ior
Normal
Height (bump) -normal and height are combined in the Max normal bump map.

Synaesthesia

We do have an export profile for VRay - it can be chosen upon project creation or during project export.

ryanonline

So it would look like this? just for others looking for this answer?

Vray                               | Quixel
Diffuse Map                  | Albedo Map
Reflect Map                  | Specular Map
Refl. Gloss.                   | Gloss Map
Bump>Normal Bump | Normal

Thanks for the replies guys!

NAIMA

I just used Albedo , Normal , Roughness , metallness ( used this for specular or when needed redone in PS ) .

musashidan

NAIMA said:

I just used Albedo , Normal , Roughness , metallness ( used this for specular or when needed redone in PS ) .

Not good. This won't give you an accurate representation.

NAIMA

musashidan said:

NAIMA said:

I just used Albedo , Normal , Roughness , metallness ( used this for specular or when needed redone in PS ) .

Not good. This won't give you an accurate representation.

Well thats what Quixel exports, and I had to use two exports one for Ue4 and one for Vray . I had manually tweaked some though.

Oh and I forgot to add that I eported several masks from Quixel as I needed ot add dirt and other things .

musashidan

NAIMA said:

musashidan said:

NAIMA said:

I just used Albedo , Normal , Roughness , metallness ( used this for specular or when needed redone in PS ) .

Not good. This won't give you an accurate representation.

Well thats what Quixel exports, and I had to use two exports one for Ue4 and one for Vray . I had manually tweaked some though.

The metalness map is a mask and shouldn't be used as a reflection map. Can you post a screenshot of the maps that QS exports as a Vray preset?

NAIMA

musashidan said:

NAIMA said:

musashidan said:

NAIMA said:

I just used Albedo , Normal , Roughness , metallness ( used this for specular or when needed redone in PS ) .

Not good. This won't give you an accurate representation.

Well thats what Quixel exports, and I had to use two exports one for Ue4 and one for Vray . I had manually tweaked some though.

The metalness map is a mask and shouldn't be used as a reflection map. Can you post a screenshot of the maps that QS exports as a Vray preset?

Yes I used that to isolate metal from nonmetal and then tweaked in PS .

This is what I got exported from DDO

https://gyazo.com/8038b2f584e6e7024ed90fb79f532051

I also exported sometimes masks of the painted metal to get the scratches etc to reproduce out of Quixel .
But indeed I did not get the same results anyway .
Oh I also used curvature, but I had to manually fix it in PS too because it created black dots all time .

musashidan

If that's what you got then it's not really a vray preset at all, it's just metal/rough maps?

NAIMA

May be I wronged export settings ? I Was pretty sure to have selected Vray .

musashidan

I think you might have.

ryanonline

Okay so.. if someone can be so kind to show maybe a print screen of a correct setup for maybe wood,metal and stone.. that would be great. Like I would but I don't really know myself. The spec and gloss I get from quixel are normally super flat, often just one tone.

I have to manually make spec and gloss maps myself which defeats the point. I'm not exactly sure whats going on. I 'm creating them as a Vray (srgb) but the only usable maps are normal and albedo.

ryanonline

Here's an example with the original spec and gloss map from Quixel as a Vray (Srgb). And my own, created in Photoshop from the original Albedo map.

musashidan

Looks like the albedo has double-gamma. I'm not sure what QS does with the preset, but just plugging your spec/gloss from it into vray isn't going to work. Vray uses a completely different shading model. That's why I said above that the conversion that S Painter does with its preset includes a fresnel ior map that tells the renderer how to shade the model. 

Vipera

Here is my test to match Vray materials with 3DO PBR materials. The first image is the Vray render. Second image is the 3DO screenshot. 
Vray


3DO


I exported textures from QuxelSuite 2.0 with the Gloss-Spec settings and didn't modify them to use in 3ds Max 2016 Vray 3.4. The lighting is slightly different because I don't know what lighting setup is in 3DO but I used the same HDR map for the lighting. I think that it is pretty close approach. If someone wants to check the material settings and 3ds max scene setup I have these files in my Dropbox folder (31 Mb).