Texturing workflow technical help!
ngon master
A lot of us remember This breakdown of Darksiders texturing workflow. I was wondering, if this setup can be applied to SP if the bent channel was baked in an external program. Why I am asking, is because the green channel of my normal map, seems way to dark compared to the one Maddy somehow whizzes up. Any tips on how to setup similiar workflow in SP?
Replies
This workflow as a cheap and quick short cut to getting a starting for for textures before Substance Painter existed.
If you want to lighten parts of the mesh that are facing up (which is ultimately what this is doing), there's probably a better way to do it with a smart mask or procedurally.
After playing around with Substance Painter a bit, I think the best way to do it would be with a mask + the Light generator. Point the vertical angle down at 270 degrees. There you can play with the highlight and falloff settings.
Here's a recreation of this Base for diffuse setup. I didn't go all out and recreate the layer stack in Photoshop, but you 100% could.
yeah for anything stylized this is pretty common. just build your gradientmap on the bottom of the stack, just like you would in photoshop, then anchor it and use it with gradientmaps furhter up the stack.
while the bent normalmap should have AO included, from my experience it looks exactly the same as the worldspace normal. just use the green channel and layer the baked ao, curvature etc on top.
yeah that is the workflow I have been doing @ZacD . It works fine, I just had the urge to do the old workflow for some reason, and my mind got stuck on why the Normal green channel is so bright compared to what i get.
@Neox Appreciate that, will try the workflow out! Thanks both of you!
The difference in green channel value you are seing is probably coming from a confusion of terms.
"Bent" normals refers to a technique that fakes some extra shading by bending the normals in a way that is not just related to the surface of the high, but also to cavity information. That way when light shines down an object you get not only the shading based on the orientation of faces, but also some extra kick in the cracks.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/Materials/BentNormalMaps/
Pretty neat stuff, especially since in UE4 an AO pass plugged into a material is ignored in many cases, as it requires a very specific setting in the level lighting settings to show up.
Now just like any normalmap bake, this special "bent" bake can be saved either as Tangent Space or as Object Space.
And then, there is the completely unrelated fact that an OS normalmap very cleanly isolates the up/down surface orientation of an object in its green channel.
So, the pass shown in the top right of the first image of that tutorial breakdown is not just a "bent normals" pass ; it's a bent normals pass saved as Object Space. But unfortunately for the sake of dumbed-down simplicity (and probably after some requests coming from artists who didn't understand what bent normals actually meant in the first place), some baking apps started calling this combined pass saved as OS a "Bent Normals pass", even though the part that most people are interested in is the top-down shading aspect of the OS bake, not the bent aspect.
And IIRC very ironically as @Neox pointed out, some baking apps even started to label "Bent Normals" an OS bake without even any bending whatsoever :D IMHO a perfect example of how "simplifying things for the user" just ends up causing confusions and errors. I am actually 99% sure that this is exactly what is going on in the tutorial breakdown.
Therefore, the pass from the tutorial (green channel of an OS-saved normals pass, probably without bending) will logically look very different from the green channel of an actual TS-saved bent normals pass, for two unrelated reasons.
(... and of course the difference you are getting could also come from somewhere else too :D )