PBR Textures in KeyShot the RIGHT Way

let's say you download textures or 3D assets from a website and when you go to use them in your render engine they just don't look nearly as good as the thumbnails did on the website from which you got them what gives well each render engine is going to do things a little bit differently so understanding how to use the texture Maps correctly is critical to getting great results today I'm going to show you how to use textures from a website called polygon inside of a render engine called keyshot which is typically used for product visualization I'm using assets from polygon's free collection so you can follow along for free and if you do decide to sign up you want to use my affiliate link down below this video when you download assets like 3D models from polygon they actually have a texture pack made specifically for popular render engines but in our case keyshot is not on the list so we would choose the option called all others these will typically come with textures for both the metalness and specular workflows when downloading textures you'll notice metallic materials will often give you the choice to download textures for either a specular or metalness workflow as well and if you're not given the option to choose specular or metalness then you may need to refer to the texture file name to see if it indicates one workflow or the other after downloading and unzipping the textures you may notice some of the textures have the word specular or others have the word metal included in file names when I downloaded this plant model for example you can see some textures end in the word specular others end in metal when creating physically based materials for rendering there is a specular workflow and a metal in workflow each requires slightly different textures to work properly in the render engine most render engines tend to use a material created by Disney called brdf which requires textures for a metalness workflow keyshot on the other hand uses a specular model for its materials requiring the use of textures created for a specular workflow before I import these tile textures notice there's no specification of specular or metal in the file name so I will assume these are made for a specular workflow another hint is that the word metal or metalness doesn't appear anywhere in any of the texture names start by connecting all the nodes with a mapping 2D node this keeps all texture orientation and scale the same across each texture you then need to set the mapping type to node on all of these textures now we can use the mapping 2D node to control the scale and orientation of all these textures and they'll stay in sync the next two steps are where most people go wrong they either connect the wrong texture to the wrong socket or they don't know what contrast level to use for each texture and I'm going to walk you through this next but to make it really easy I made a cheat sheet just for you this way you don't need to commit anything to memory just follow the link down below to the file Vault scroll down until you find the cheat sheet download it and keep it somewhere safe and then you can reference it instead of having to come back to this video alright let's connect our Textures in keyshot we're just going to use a simple plastic material type for this material you can't see the entire name of the texture by looking at the node double click on it and you can see the full texture name and the texture properties on the right side of the material graph we'll work from the top down starting off with the diffuse socket on this material the texture that goes into diffuse is called either color or Albedo Albedo is the same thing as color but without any shadows and since we rely on other properties to cast shadows in keyshot we would choose Albedo if it's available now keep in mind that because descriptive file names can get really long it's not uncommon for companies to abbreviate the texture name in this case color is abbreviated to col the next socket is specular and it controls how reflective a surface is either a specular or reflectance Texture will be connected to the specular socket depending on which one is available I don't see a specular texture here so I'll take the map with refl and connect it to the specular socket next we have roughness and we'll be connecting a roughness or a gloss texture to it roughness is the opposite of gloss and both can be used in keyshot however roughness would be my first choice in this case I have a gloss so I'll connect it to the roughness socket then we have a bump socket which will connect either a normal or bump texture to normal texture should be your first choice though as they create way more realistic results nrm in this case is the abbreviation for normal and I'll connect that to the bump socket finally you have a displacement texture you'll connect that to a geometry node which then gets plugged into a geometry socket on the root node disp is short for displacement so I'll take the displacement 16-bit version and plug that into the geometry node now you may find that some of your textures include a 16-bit or a 16 in the title name these textures contain more data and can produce far better results however because they take up a lot more space on your hard drive and vram in your GPU and rendering they aren't always practical to use so generally speaking if you are rendering on your GPU and aren't at risk of running low on vram I recommend using the 16-bit texture but if you're using CPU rendering then vram limitation does not apply to you and I recommend using 16-bit versions of textures when you can I'll go ahead and delete these unused textures since we won't be needing them here now we'll make the necessary changes to the textures so they look correct inside of keyshot now in theory color and Albedo Maps should not need to be changed at all polygon saves these in the srgb color space which is common for the PBR workflow however keyshot automatically assume all textures are in the srgb color space with a gamma value of 2. but the gamma curve associated with the srgb color space traditionally is in fact 2.2 not 2.0 so you may want to make some slight adjustments to the contrast of these textures which can be done in the textures color properties a value between 1 and 1.5 should be plenty everything I said about color and Albedo also would apply to the specular or reflectance textures as polygon also saves those in the srgb color space now these next Maps we're going to be using contain something called linear data I'll link to an article I wrote on this topic in case you want to learn more but the takeaway for you is this when using textures that contain linear data inside of keyshot an additional step must be taken so keyshot reads it correctly as a rule of thumb when working with PBR textures you can assume that all non-color textures are linear common examples include metalness roughness ambient occlusion displacement glossiness or roughness these are all considered non-colored textures because our roughness texture is the opposite of gloss we actually need to invert this texture which we can do with a color invert node and because roughness is a non-colored texture we are going to assume it's linear to get keyshot to interpret this texture as linear we'll go to the textures color properties and set the contrast to zero for the bump texture you won't need to make any adjustments to the contrast if you're using a normal map make sure the normal map checkbox is indeed enabled this way keyshot will read the RGB values as vectors and reflect the light accordingly you may also need to invert this texture for it to look right I found this to be quite often the case with polygon textures so I'll set this one to a value of about minus 0.5 and finally because the displacement texture is also linear we should set its contrast to zero again if you have a 16-bit version it will produce better results so go ahead and use that now in our geometry node we need to set the displacement height to a reasonable value then press the geometry node button if there isn't enough detail or the results look Jagged just reduce the triangle size and press the geometry node button again so at this point you've matched up the right textures to the correct sockets and told keyshot which textures need to be read as linear while your textures are now being used correctly there's one last step that we can't forget and that is creative Liberty sometimes your materials just need to be adjusted to serve your rendering and for me this usually comes in the form of adjusting textures plugged into the roughness and specular sockets I'll show you how to do this next let's add a color to number node to the left of the specular socket and then press C on the keyboard to preview this node in keyshot Pure White is 100 specular so to get shiny tiles we need to increase the output to slider until we reach a pure white output 2 represents the maximum white value in this case I'll use a value of 15. next I'll increase the input from value until I see some detail in the tile texture which will give us some variation in how shiny the tile looks then I'll increase the output from value to make the grout a dark gray this will be the least reflective part of the material and finally I'll increase the output to Value until the brightest parts of this texture appear Pure White Once Again in this case I had to go all the way up to about 200 I think so after that press C to escape the preview mode and disable the roughness texture to see how much of an impact this has on our tiles so now we want to do the same thing with our texture plugged into our roughness socket the only difference is that in keyshot the black pixels of a texture will result in a glossy surface and the white will produce a rough surface I'll increase the input from value until we see more detail in the texture in this case about .05 worked well then I'll reduce the output 2 value which lowers the contrast a bit resulting in a more glossy overall finish about 0.3 worked well here for me the same can be done for the specular value but remember white values will produce a more reflective surface while dark values will produce a less reflective surface when editing the specular property and there you have it that's how to use PBR texture packs in keyshot correctly while I use polygon for this example the same workflow should apply to PBR textures from most suppliers now if you want me to cover how to use textures for a metalness workflow in keyshot leave a comment down below and remember download the keyshot PBR material cheat sheet linked down below it will save you from having to come back and re-watch this whole video so until next time happy rendering

Channel: Will Gibbons | 3D Rendering

Views: 6,879

Keywords: will gibbons, wil gibbons, will gibbins, will gibons, will gibins, keyshot, rendering, tutorial, animation, studio, freelance

Id: pM7HytgNV2g

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023