Substance Designer: Linear vs SRGB output?
polycounter lvl 18
I came across some threads in the Allegorithmic forum that seem to imply that all maps except the diffuse/base are converted into linear. Was this only for the 3D previewer in Substance alone? I attempted to change the output nodes to different types (say base versus roughness), and they still exported out the same way.
So in short, are all exported materials using srgb and you have to set the engine manually to use linear for the appropriate channels? If this is the case, is there a way to change this without adding a linear node before the appropriate outputs though the programs setup for exports.
So in short, are all exported materials using srgb and you have to set the engine manually to use linear for the appropriate channels? If this is the case, is there a way to change this without adding a linear node before the appropriate outputs though the programs setup for exports.
Replies
As of 2017 designer has been fully linear with regard to how its own viewport shader expects textures.
However..
It displays basecolor/emissive/specular to you with an srgb curve applied and that's what it exports.
In the case of ue4 you need to reverse the gamma curve in your shader if you want to use 16bit color images from substance because it treats 16bit color images as if they are linear and the standard Shader is expecting the information in gamma space.
You can add user data flags to output nodes in substance that can be read by other apps but AFAIK they're not supported by anything widely available..
https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=129368216#content/view/140902410
So basically yes, you need to sort it out yourself.
To my mind, substance is doing the right thing - the channels it outputs in srgb are human readable information and should be stored as such.