What is this texture file exactly and how is it build?

AFsoft

Hi, i ve been looking on a persian forum, they've been discussing on a topic that i saw this, they gave some information about mixing Metalness,Roughness and AO into one map to saving memory. is it right? what is this map called and how is it build?

throttlekitty

This belongs in the Technical Talk subforum.

There's no real name for textures like this (games might refer to them differently), they could contain anything you need. The technique is called Channel Packing, how you do it depends on which software you're using.

AFsoft

throttlekitty said:

This belongs in the Technical Talk subforum.

There's no real name for textures like this (games might refer to them differently), they could contain anything you need. The technique is called Channel Packing, how you do it depends on which software you're using.

would you explain how these channel are combined ? so i guess users of this method must create a custom shader right?

Alex_J

In Substance Painter in the export parameters you can choose to pack texture channels into the R,G,B, or Alpha channels, respectively.

Marmoset Toolbags default shader allows you to choose which channel you want to display per output. So if you had metalness in the Blue channel, you select that, disable sRGB reading, and it displays correctly.

Unreal 4 has default packing for the Metalness, Roughness, and Ambient Occlusion textures.

Unity standard shader does not support packing (I think.)


Any textures that are a grayscale value can be packed. And of course you can pack them into a PSD file as well, if you aren't using Substance programs.

AFsoft

Thanks @bigtimemaster