Setting up and creating a texturing and shading workflow is a must for any 3d artist working in interior architecture. Here, you will learn how to import and realistically texture models in Substance Painter, then import and render within 3ds Max.
To Shading And Texturing In 3ds
Learning a texturing workflow is one way to advance your texturing game to the forefront of what CG artists are currently creating. In this course, Shading and Texturing Interior Architecture with Substance Painter and V-Ray for 3ds Max, you will learn how Substance Painter is used in architectural renderings to create custom textures. First, you will produce several photorealistic 8K texture maps that will bring a higher level of realism to the objects in your scene. Then, you will discover how to set up your materials in 3Ds Max and V-Ray 3.4 to give you more control over the material. Last, you will render the scene to produce realistic results. By the end of this course, will you know how to take your modeled assets from within 3Ds Max, texture them in Substance Painter, and correctly bring everything back into 3Ds Max while rendering in V-Ray. Software required: Substance Painter, V-Ray, and 3ds Max.
There are certain situations in 3ds max where using a ProBoolean operation on a model will perform the geometrical operation but produce shading/smoothing artifacts, or problems in later operations like Chamfer.* This can often happen with geometry (models) imported from other software like Sketchup for instance
Ambient Occlusion Maps are usually employed to enhance the realism of a model. AO, as it is often called, simulates shadows generated by the environment, especially on concave areas of models. The effect is especially noticeable when compared to a model without it. Notice how the image on the right, with AO, displays better tonal shading, as well as a slight darkening of the surface immediately beneath the sphere.
Over the years I've learned and developed my own solutions and methods for complex texturing. The blood knight is the second of several characters I'm making and since he's the one who experiences the battle up close and personal, I've decided that with him I will try to push my methods and add lots of details such as dirt, scratches, stains, blood, decorations etc using a method I like to call "multi-channel texturing". My main focus on this character was the texturing / shading and in this tutorial I will share the process, considerations and a few other tips (Fig.01).
The method I refer to as multi-channel texturing takes advantage of the ability to have many different map channels (in other software, like Maya, these are referred to as UV-sets) for the same object, while it's material is made out of many maps mixed together using masks with these map channels.In other words - almost the entire texturing process of the character's armour parts is done within Max, through the UV's and using only one material and a few textures.The end result of this is that all of the armour's parts (over 40 different objects in the blood knight's case) use the same material, with just a few textures. This is opposed to the "classic" texturing method in which you end up with many materials and hundreds of different texture files (assuming each material will have several textures for colour / bump / specular etc') (Fig.02).
Throughout the modelling process I've had the base material ready for early testing. The base material is made out of 100% procedural maps and that is why it did not require me to unwrap the model as I was still working on it. The complex final stage of the texturing only came once I'd decided modelling was done.The base material is made out of a multi sub object with four ID's: 1- The main armour's metal, 2 - The armour's outer gold, 3 - The diamonds, 4 - Silver. I will focus this tutorial on the main armour's metal (Fig.05).
I'm not going to go through all the specific parameters of each map, because many different combinations can work just fine and it is all a matter of trial and adjustments; you can look at the shading network chart I've made to get the general idea. My advice for this step is to add one map at a time, and always make sure you keep track of the contribution each map gives to the details. It sometimes helps to copy the specific map you are working on to a clean new material and apply it to the model just to check how it fits it.Tip - I often use an Ambient occlusion map as a mix map at the base of the diffuse colour for added depth detail. For the white colour I simply add the maps I was going to use anyway and for the dark colour I add some noise maps for "corner dirt".
In this tutorial I am focusing on the shading of the armour's metal material, but I just wanted to mention here that I've also used the same map channel 2 unwrap for the diamonds - in the diamonds' material I've placed a radial gradient map in the "extra light" slot to give them extra subtle depth. I went through every object that had diamonds in it and in the same map channel 2 unwrap modifier that was already there, I've selected the diamonds UV's and manipulated them around one of the tiles of the gradient (and not necessarily in the centre of the UV's to avoid cluttering) (Fig.20).
If you like not leaving the 3D viewport, you may also want to try the DreamUV add-on, which is a collection of UV tools for the 3D view sidebar. Its most interesting feature, in my opinion, is hotspotting. That tool will attempt to find an appropriately sized rectangle on the texture atlas and automatically fit it to the selected mesh based on the seams. DreamUV is specifically made for interactively texturing objects using tiled textures or trim sheets, so game artists should definitely give it a try.
For this reason no file format you use can, or even tries to, import or export material properties, be it 3DS, FBX, Collada, STL, OBJ or any other. These are mostly mesh-only, geometry-centric file formats concerned with porting object shapes, and some times animation, armature, and basic shading, or color properties (like MTL files); never full complex material definitions.
One notable exception to all this is the glTF file format, which as of version 2.0 glTF does support some material definitions based on a metallic-roughness shading model in its specs. The glTF-Blender-IO addon created by the Khronos Group themselves supports exporting Principled BSDF node based materials. But even then some restrictions apply, it must only contain pure image texture based materials connected directly to a Principled BSDF shader, without any transformations or interference from other nodes or textures. As of 2.9+ the Blender manual states which setups are supported by GLTF 2.0, which include Principled BSDF and Shadeless (Unlit).
Baking is the process of pre-calculating shading and storing it in a static image texture that may incorporate several optional channels like diffuse, glossy, indirect lighting, bump maps, normal maps, light-maps, among others. This may improve graphic quality or perceived "realism" at the expense of dynamism, as certain properties of materials and textures may become static, as if "painted onto the surface", like shadows or reflections. This is often a requirement for high performance mediums or low power platforms, like web or mobile gaming, where available resources are limited or unknown, and speed takes precedence over graphic fidelity.
Materials with a single shading model and a relatively simple graph should translate very well. For example, Datasmith translates the following 3ds Max material relatively smoothly into the Parent Material's graph:
If you open the Parent Material Assets, you'll notice that their graphs are often a little different from what you started with in 3ds Max, even for simple materials like the one shown above. This is a normal result of converting between shading models: Datasmith attempts to preserve the visual result as closely as possible, even if this sometimes means inserting extra connections or constants into the graph.
That said, 3ds Max supports multiple different shading models for materials, such as V-Ray, Corona, Arnold, Mental Ray, and more. Each shading model is a separate piece of software, with its own unique features that are not always consistent with one another. Sometimes, Datasmith is able to convert these features into similar features offered by the Unreal Engine.
However, Datasmith can't always handle the more esoteric features of these shading models. It may not be able to produce equivalent results in Unreal for materials with complex graphs that mix multiple output shaders together, such as this example:
Normals play a central role in shading. Everybody knows that an object becomes brighter if we orient it towards a light source. The orientation of an object surface plays an important role in the amount of light it reflects (and thus how bright it looks like). This orientation can be represented at any point \(P\) on the surface of an object, by a normal \(N\) which is perpendicular to the surface at \(P\) as shown in figure 1\. Note in figure 1, how the brightness of the sphere decreases as the angle between the light direction and the normal increases. This decrease in brightness is something we can see everyday and yet probably few people know why it happens. We will explain the cause of this phenomenon in a short while. For now, you should only remember that:
Computing the normal that way gives what we call a face normal (because the normal is the same for the entire face, regardless of the point you pick on that face or triangle). Normals of triangle meshes can also be defined at the vertices of the triangle, in which case we call these normals vertex normals. Vertex normals are used in a technique called smooth shading which you will find described at the end of this chapter. For now, we will only deal with face normals. 2ff7e9595c
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