Substance Plugin for 3Ds Max / Vray - Different Results

sknueppel

Hey There
I Encountered a problem, at least it seems like one ^^, with the substance Plugin tool
Im Using Max 2018 and Vray 3.60.04
The Plugin itself works fine for me in this setup, but theres a big bummer.

As my favourite renderfarm (Rebusfarm) is not supporting substance nodes I tried to bake the textures in the node with the substance Output settings -> Bake Outputs button.
When I copied my Vray material and put the new baked textures in, I got a "completely" different result (green does not turn into yellow, but you get what I mean).

I realy love this tool, as it is pretty fast and I get my stuff done realy quick, but as long as the baking node doesnt "work" I can not realy use it. 
Or I m doing something COMPLETELY Wrong?! 
Any suggestions?

All the best ^^

sknueppel

A New Problem appears.... not the best day.
After digging deeper in the rendering issue, described in the Post above I clicked "Apply" on the substance notification when it appears. 
When I wanted to render a new test setup I encounterd the second and Third Screenshot and the app crashed. 
It would be realy great to hear something that could help.

Greetings

sknueppel

I tryied some new and different settings.
First of all there is a difference when you Export Bitmap and PNG (Jpeg will be tested next) colourwise.
I tried to show it with the attached picture.

I checked the Color Correction nodes of the Substance to Vray nodes.
Copied  and added them to a standard Vray MTL, plugged my Bitmaps and Pngs in them an switched the Color Correction nodes ON and Off... 
Result is, either when switched On as when switched off, I dont get the result of the Substance Material.

At the moment I m not sure what to try else, maybe you have a new idea?

What you see:
Picture one is a comparison between all Materials

Picture two is a comparison between the Imported PNG Diffuse and the Diffuse created with the substance Material

All the best ^^

sknueppel

Okey, final Post from my side until I hear something new

I reworked on the Scene setup, To show the differences not only in the Diffuse.

There is only one Top light and as you can see, the Materials react differently on it.

I have no clue on my site how to get an evenly result so I ll gonna wait untill there is a solution or a work around.

poopipe

It looks like a colorspace issue to me.  

I've no idea how vray works but if you feed a 16bit per channel color image into some things it assumes they're linear - substance will output basecolor as sRGB so you'll end up with the wrong values in those cases. 


It also looks like its baking your maps out at a cack resolution but that's a whole other problem 

sknueppel

Thank you very much for your reply,

I have to test this out, sadly I m not that much into colorcorrections and gamma control.

As far as I knew I only had to gammacorrect the monochromatic and normal maps and not the diffuse, when I was importing the textures by their own.

To be honest now I m a bit confused by all the options and gonna try to find a setup that suits me.

When anyone has encountered a good workflow I would appreciate it.

As I said, Usually I wouldn t need to "bake" the outputs, only when I have to send them to a render farm.

All the best^^

sknueppel

One last thing, 
as the results were differently when baking the outputs with the substance tool inside of 3DsMax and exporting the same substance material in Substance player as PNG with default settings, it seems like there is a color correction already happening on the textures.

Burpee

Looks like a gamma correction, 
The " Substance 3ds max plug in " looks linearise while the substance player export images as srgb.

I'm not sure about 3ds max, but you should be able to tell if your input texture is linear, srgb etc...

sknueppel

Okey, I ll gonna Check this, thank you!
I m not that much into colorspaces... thats why I m pretty unsure in this topic

sknueppel

Okey, after watchin several tutorials about Linear workflow and gamma correction, I think I get it a bit better.

So it seems that the substance Plugin in 3Ds Max (or 3DsMax itself) is exporting Gamma corrected PNGs while the Substance Player is doing it in Linear Workflow, is this right?!

It confused me alot and still is... 
I m sorry if I was writing the same with new examples ^^ 

sknueppel

Last one.... I Promise ^^
I made some tests (again) regarding what I ve "learned" and got a result that is almost as the Sbsar file. 
Still not 100% but to make it easier for you to see what Ive done I made a little chart with all my settings, 
so maybe it is something like "Captain Obvious is wavieng ^^" I realy hope so!

I realy hope I m not the only guy on this planet that got problems with this hahah

All the best and have a great weekend.

VelvetElvis

It is a known issue that the gamma is saved out wrong when baking materials. It is related to Substance as everything else out of Max and Vray save in the correct gamma space.

An easier way to work around this is to either A - Batch process them in Photoshop or B - Use the Vray HDRI texture to load all of your bitmaps.

In Photoshop a gamma of .454 will correct them and you can load them into Max as you normally would.

In the Vray HDRI texture, a gamma correction of .227 will correct the issue. You have to double down the correction to compensate for it being saved wrong and loaded wrong.



Left is the original substance with the plugin. Middle is the Vray HDRI corrected. Right is the Photoshop corrected. Note, I haven't loaded the glossy/roughness on the comparison ones, so they will look slightly different than the original substance one.

Diffuse was the only one tested, but I suspect the normal spec/glossy or roughness will be a different gamma correction value.