Substances look vastly different inside UE4
interpolator
I have a bit of a problem. The render given in Substance Designer is wildly inaccurate compared to the final result inside UE4. It's forcing me to do a lot of back and forth. Does anyone know of a good solution? I know a UE4 shader exists for Painter, but not for Designer I think. I don't think you can even change the shader in Designer.
I'm exporting .TGAs and creating a material with them inside UE4, so I know the textures are identical between the two of them without any distortion.
The problem is purely just a massive difference in shaders.
I'm exporting .TGAs and creating a material with them inside UE4, so I know the textures are identical between the two of them without any distortion.
The problem is purely just a massive difference in shaders.
Replies
This is from the default sidescroller project in UE4, with the material replacing the ground.
Here's an image of the base color map below for reference.
But as Jeremie said, as long as you're matching lighting conditions and exposure, there shouldn't be any differences aside from the lack of ACES and how the two programs sample reflections.
If your texture in the UE4 texture viewer is identical to the exported texture, then the import settings are correct(sRGB is all that's needed). If the UE4 gbuffer Base Color visualizer(Lit > Buffer Visualization > Base Color) is off from what you exported, then whatever you're doing in the shader is altering the color. If that's identical as well, then it just comes down to the lighting/post-process.
Also, I've looked at it in a few lighting conditions, and the difference is consistent.
I would suggest two things to debug this particular case :
1 - taking the time to compare the results on a simple color checker material/object.
2 - Having a look at this writeup and talk, which gives a lot of tips on how to calibrate UE for predictable lighting :
http://www.tomlooman.com/lighting-with-unreal-engine-jerome/
Good luck.
16bit textures should work properly starting with UE4 4.16.
Highlight intensity, contrast of normal map shading , white colors intensity are never same and always off at any lighting condition. It's probably because of static sun angle in SD never matching any specific game scene.
Would be so much easier if SD would just allow to change sun altitude, color and intensity and have separate skydome and direct light sources, preferably with an animated day/night cycle instead of HDR images which is always a huge pain in the a... to tweak.
I have zero problem to make close looking lighting in Blender Cycles for example. Would love to do same in SD
Things like not using importance sampling and differences in brdf can have a significant effect and that's before you get started on whether your lighting system is "correct" or just a mash up of random numbers (like most) and whether your exposure and color grading are set up the same way.
Just cos you're chucking the same maps in doesn't mean you'll get the same results ...
It's also worth noting that substance doesnt compress or mip its inputs and uses pretty high resolution ibls.
To my mind, IBLs are safer than allowing configurable lighting - as soon as that sort of thing is available to an artist they'll mess with it and youll end up with borked values in your textures because theyve ramped the sun up to 11 and compensated by darkening everything.
I've found out that UE4 botches .png textures through some sort of gamma correction, which is what causes them to look all bright and washed out.
After examining it, I think the problem here is the opposite; I think UE4 is driving the gamma down instead of up, making everything darker and distorting the colors.
I tested the material inside Marmoset, and the result was much more similar to Substance Designer.
Instead of taking a few steps back to make Unreal match Painter, make Painter match Unreal. There are a few options that should give you a very close match(disregarding shading model differences and how Painter renders).
This adds ACES to the shading model as well as some fake light actors from Allegorithmic's own Jeremie: https://share.substance3d.com/libraries/4450
This is my own solution which packages the ACES RRT/ODT into a LUT(with one standard version and one with UE4's gain of 1.45 applied): https://www.artstation.com/artwork/mrqd8
This is a similar solution with a LUT and accompanying Painter Filters that transform source content to the proper color space, which is not necessarily required for game engines: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2xkEbY
Edit: Also as noted above, exporting out of Painter as PNG applies a separate gamma transform where importing into Unreal generally reverses the needed gamma setting(i.e. PNG Albedo is imported as Linear, when it should not be).
(Basecolor/Difuse/Albedo) Textures exported from Substance Designer as PNG files had that weird gamma transform issue that leleuxart had mentioned. Saving out of Substance Designer as a targa or other suitable file type fixed that issue for me.
(Basecolor/Difuse/Albedo) Textures exported from Substance Painter as PNG were completely fine for me, however my Roughness and Metallic maps had to be manually changed from sRGB to Linear inside UE4.
Plus, it's been a little while, but I recall finding out that UE4 was creating actual artifacts in the texture upon import. They were difficult to notice here, but much easier to notice in a different material I had been working on.
It's some sort of compression error. If the colors are too similar, UE4 merges them into a single color and creates a lot of flat details.
The larger issues here with the darkening and saturating are not identical, but I'm assuming they're related.
I never found a solution, but luckily I haven't had to work with UE4 in a while
I'm sick of all UE4's longstanding bullshit import issues. Next time I work with a game engine, I'll probably try Unity.
The import issues are with DXT compression, not necessarily Unreal.
If you're importing a color texture(or packed texture), you can try compressing with BC7. It will increase your texture size on disk though.
And if you're importing a grayscale(single channel) texture, you can try the Greyscale option which is a full 8 bits for the single channel iirc. This will also increase your texture size on disk, but the compression is fairly good in that you could potentially drop the texture resolution down to the next level and not see any difference.