Substance Designer 2018.3 Environment Reflection Broke

Calvinatorr

I've noticed that the default panoramic environment map in 2018.3 isn't being rendered properly to the reflection on my material, making using the software really difficult as I can't see a proper specular highlight to work from.

This is what I get in 2018.2.2 which is what I expect.

And then increasing the roughness correctly blurs this.


But opening the environment image actually gives me this where the sun is - which is also what I see in the reflection in 2018.3. 


I'm guessing this is to do with the default environment image being HDR, but it'd be great if anyone could clarify or give me a hand because trying to work with this in 2018.3 is just impossible.

bitinn

Well mate you are not the only one, SD 2018.3 changes the way environment map are rendered, which I suspect cause a whole bunch of bugs on specific hardwares.

https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,27373.0.html

Jerc

The default exposure of the HDR image will depends which tool you open it with. There is nothing wrong with the image you posted, it's just that the pixels in the sky are brighter than 1.
Do you have screenshots of what the issue is in 2018.3?

Calvinatorr

I'll get some images from mine at home. Installed 2018.3 on a different machine though and I don't have this issue (my home PC is Windows 10, AMD RX 580 8GB, 16GB RAM, i5 4590 - standard stuff you get the idea).
But I do get the following issues on my work PC when testing this (Windows 10, Nvidia GTX 1070 8GB, 32GB RAM, i7-5820k).



It looks as though the cubemap is being sampled in the vertex shader instead of the frag shader causing these weird interpolation issues - or it could be mip-related. Something has definitely changed about how cubemaps work though.

Also yes on my machine at home where I was having those original issues it is as though the reflection sampler is clamping values between 0 and 1, thus cutting off the HDR range. 

oblomov

@Calvinatorr : the latest screenshot you have posted is probably another issue entirely. This looks like what happens when there is a normal output in your graph without anything connected to it (which means you are applying a transparent black (0,0,0,0) normal map on your mesh instead of the default "blue" (128,128,255,255) neutral normal).

Calvinatorr

@oblomov Good catch, I didn't realise that. I expected a blank input to be filled with a neutral normal but I guess I was wrong there.
Guess that just leaves my original issue with my reflection map not being read as HDR.

Calvinatorr

This is what I get on my PC at home (probably should have led with this screenshot). You can see how it doesn't seem to be reading the values past 1 in the HDR texture properly so it's over blowing it.