Substance Painter to Maya V-Ray - Using the Substance Workflow Plugin

hey everyone today we will cover how to export our textures from substance painter and how to set them up properly with v-ray and maya we will specifically cover how to use the relatively new substance painter workflow plug-in to automatically link textures this is part of the new substance painter ecosystem and plugins for maya the substance and maya plug-in comes automatically installed after maya 2018 but if you're looking for an installer i'll link that below in the description i've covered how to do this manually in previous videos but in this video i will also show you how to link height maps as displacements while also saving times by automating the texture setup so with that let's get started alright so here we are in substance painter i have this shader ball all ready to go fully textured that i'll be using for this demonstration it's just composed of some modified smart materials with some some of my own custom texturing all right if you're interested in the shader ball you can look up grant warwick i'll link that down below in the comments uh or in the description so you can grab that and use that for your own look dev all right so the first thing i always do is make sure i go and create some ray trace renders using irae so i go ahead and hit this camera icon over here which does rendering irae and i create a couple of decently high-res images so i have a fully retraced image because that's what you want to compare between the two render engines you want to compare irae directly with fire all right so once you have some renders you can basically let that run and you can save off a couple of renders using the the render settings and once we're done with that you go ahead and now export your textures so i'll go to file export textures so the export textures window pops up and you can see that we have all of our texture sets here some global settings and everything and you also have output templates now we are specifically going to be using v-ray next metallic roughness workflow but keep in mind that if you're using vray 5 this workflow will work um with this as well but this will not work with anything previous to vray next so if you're using vray 3.6 or older you're going to have to watch one of my older videos where i show you how to do that using the manual process all right so uh everything's going to stay here it only exports what you have enabled in your text your set settings and this is uh this is all we need here right so i will go back to settings i will make sure that the output template here is set to v-ray next typically it's set to pbr metallic roughness but i'll go ahead and just set this to v-ray next metallic roughness i'll leave it as png i'll leave it as eight bits and in typically you can leave the size as the texture set size but i go for about 4k or 4096 when i'm doing still renders and i leave dilation set to infinite all right now i go ahead and also use the output directory as my maya folder so you can see that i have my maya folder here set up and i'm just going to export this right into source images so i select folder and i'm all set and so once all of that is set up i make sure i have the right template file type resolution channels and padding i go ahead and simply export and this is about 35 maps at 4k so i'm going to pause and let this export all right great it's done so it went ahead and exported out all the maps that we need and i can actually pull this up and find my source images folder and you can see that everything is has exported properly and you can see that it hasn't exported anything that we don't need so there's no anisotropic or there's no transmissive even though it'll say here if it's not there it won't export anything great so i'll go ahead and close this and we're going to be all set here with substance painter so i'm going to go and jump into maya so for this comparison i have a render scene all ready to go now we can start setting up our materials and textures and the first thing that you're going to want to do is make sure that you have the substance plug-in loaded so the way to do that is just go to windows settings preferences plugin manager and then you're going to scroll down you can see that i'm already scrolled down here but you'll typically start at the top go all the way down until you find the substance set of plugins here and you can see right there and i typically just load all of these and we specifically want the substance workflow but uh or we'll be using that but we definitely want all of these so enable all of those close then you're gonna see this here this shelf here that says substance so you're going to select a substance shelf and these are all the new tools um i was teaching last semester and a student of mine was like hey i watch a tutorial on how to manually do this but there's a new plugin that automatically does it so i was like heck yeah so he showed me and i went and did a couple of tests with this and it works fantastic so the specific tool that you're going to want to use is this one right here the one that says apply workflow to maps all right so i want to go ahead and hit apply workflow to maps and then you get the apply workflow to image maps uh window here so we want to make sure of course we're going to be using v-ray next so go to workflow vray next and then now select multiple maps now keep in mind that once i go to source images here that you don't want to select all of these and import them that's not going to work you do have to still do this by batch so i'm going to select first the main matte so naming obviously is really important here and i'm going to use export main metal and and then i'll come back and do this about four other times but this will work for for what i need so i go ahead and select these and you can see these are all the maps i'm not using ambient occlusion again because i will be just using the gi ambient occlusion here all right or doing it as a separate separate render pass but once you have that actually before i hit apply i want to show you what what's going to happen here i'm going to open up the hypershade and i'm going to bring our hypershade over here and we're going to scale this down just a little bit give us some room and put this over here all right and i'm going to go ahead and hit apply and there you go it automatically creates this node here this material setup uh an entire graph system that automatically went ahead and linked it there you go right now there's one thing actually i have to say before where we can you know kind of uh pat our hands and say we're done here is you want to make sure you specifically go down to the normal uh map here okay uh they still need to fix this um maybe they'll patch this but right now it imports if you scroll down to bump map and normal map and you see map type bump map that's not going to render properly so you have to change this from bump map to normal map in tangent space okay because if your normal map basically the easy way to know is if it's purple it's tangent space if it's black and white it's bump all right so setting that to normal map will give you everything that you need and if i go ahead right and take a look now look at this surface shader here so if we select the v-ray material and then you go over here look at that displacement material it's plugging in our display our height map as a displacement node right here okay so if you want to use your height map and if you don't want you can simply remove it you have that ready to go all right so what i'm going to do is actually just call this you know matt main metal that main metal and then call it substance and i'm going to select the other material that i have which is this i'll hold right click select objects with material and then i'll hold right click on my main metal and assign material to selection all right now i can go ahead actually and go into a textured view so we can kind of see make sure everything looks okay and i'll turn off wireframe on shaded and you can see there we go it's been applied now i have to manually apply it there but it's these two objects that i have in here that have this material applied all right great so i have this set up and let's just do let's just do a quick render i'm going to be using progressive here with just basic irradiance map and light cache with some low settings here so if you want to take a look at my settings that's what i'm using there and i'm just doing 540 all right and i will go ahead and kick off a quick render let's go and there we go look at that i mean that is pretty good i mean that's one for one what we had in substance painter which is fantastic and that all happened with just this simple plugin that's gonna link i mean how many maps do i have in here right it's going to link all of these maps here and save an immense amount of time about 26 texture maps okay so i still have the other materials and texture maps to import but before i do that i want to make sure that everything looks good here okay and we have displacement again so let's say that you already have everything set up but you're like hey hey mmr i want to go ahead and only add my height map how do i do that no problem you can go to the previous material so i'm just going to use this as an example and i can grab just a vray material and you can see here under this shading group okay you have displacement material and if you want to plug in a height map well i just simply go to displacement map displacement material i go ahead and hit this box and then it's going to be looking for displacement right we have to add a displacement node all right so what i typically do is go up to the top under maya and i type in displacement and then i add a displacement node so i add a displacement node here then specifically for this surface shader here i can now plug in the texture and i can do that by simply using this displacement checker box here because remember if you take a look i'll keep this here and i'll also select this material here and then i'll output so i'll shift-click both of these and then output connections and again you can kind of see how this is set up you can see that this right here is using displacement now if you don't see displacement you have to select these two nodes and then the shader group here okay so then output connections and then you'll see it kind of hiding here and then it's right here under let's see where's the height there it is displacement shader and so we're just going to plug it in to this node here all right so we have this we have the displacement shader and then we have displacement and then you can just find this by using just you know file and plugging it in as a normal file now keep in mind color space is important here all right so i'll make sure to do that main height and that goes ahead and plugs in properly uh here all right so we got this set up this setup and then output connections and there you go so just make sure to do output connections so you can see what's happening with this but that's how you take if you wanted to manually do your own height map as displacement that's how you would plug it in okay so i hope that helped i know that was a lot of questions that came up on the other videos there's a lot of comments that says all right i got you guys i'll i'll take care of you so that's how you quickly do that and if we go back to this matte main that we had i want to make sure just to cover that it also covers color space so you can see that our normal is set to raw our emissive is srgb as well as our base colors srgb and metallic is set to raw and roughness is set to raw so it takes care of all of that the only manual step that we have to do is setting the normal map okay so i think that um that about covers it what i'll do is i'll do this one more time uh just to kind of recap here uh on the next set of textures all right so again i'll go to the substance shelf i'll grab the output or apply workflow to image maps i'll go to v-ray next select multiple maps and we'll start from the top so i want the black base here and we want all of these i go ahead and select and i hit apply and there you go so now it creates a new material here in in v-ray and it creates it as v-ray material four so i'll call this you know matte base substance okay and i want to make sure to do matte black base and i select that hold right clicks okay hold right click select select objects with material and then i will do mat based substance apply material selection to selection then i go over here output connections make sure everything looks good and just to double check we can see that it also linked our height map and we can see that all of our color spaces are properly set and we just need to make sure that our normal map is set to tangent space okay so with that i go ahead and do another render so we can bring this over here and there we go all right now the last thing that i want to show is how to let's say you want to boost this emissive that's also something that came up in my last video and if we take a look at this we can see that it's looking okay and we can see that it's you know doing what it needs to do but it's not really emitting that much light and even if i go ahead right let me let this go for a little bit with progressive clean that up so i'll stop that and even if i go to here down at the bottom of the v-ray frame buffer and i open lens effects and i turn on bloom and glare all right and then you can see that basically turns that black and let's see we have effects result it was trying to denoise so i didn't let it finish denoising but we have this right here at the rgb color right and it's still not giving us that uh even if i boost intensity it's not giving us that bloom and glare all right so what i want to do is i will go ahead and actually switch the sampler type to bucket then i want to go ahead and do a quick render with this set to bucket and we can kind of see what it's doing here you can see the threshold is also pretty low but it will render pretty fast at a low resolution so i'll pause real quick okay and i did lower the uh settings here just so it renders a little bit faster but uh you can see even with the bloom and glare and if i even increase intensity i'm still not getting a lot of bloom coming off of here well what we need to do is go to our material here and go to the emissive so if i find emissive which should be output connections i think that was the other material emissive and srgb i go to color balance and i bump up the exposure now i tried one two but i really had in order to get some uh bloom coming off of that really had to bump this up to about four exposure okay so that's going to really push the brightness here and let's just go ahead and do another render and let that go and i'll just pause real quick and boom look at that you can already see the actually i can probably just do this with the mouse here so it kind of focuses on this area and then i can let this go and you can see that the it's working on this image okay and make sure to leave it on rgb color and uh that's typically how i adjust it now this may be quite a bit with uh set intensity to one and i'll let this finish here real quick okay and there you go and then now you can see that you have some control over here so i can bring that up and increase the bloom and start to get some nice effects here now that is a bit intense so you can play with those values but i at least wanted to show you what you can do to have a little bit of control um you know to have some blooming glare on on your images all right and how to really control that emissive value so all right i think that that about does it um let me just go ahead and pause real quick and connect all the uh all the maps and then we'll look at the last final render here all right and there we go so here's the final render and if i bring over the hypershade you'll see that i have all of these substance materials set up and if i go ahead and output those connections you'll see one two three four need about one more [Music] okay and there we go all five materials all with about the five or six maps linked together and that was all done in just a few minutes using the apply workflow tool here which is incredibly incredibly helpful so i hope this also saves you guys time down the road and you also found equally helpful so if you guys got any questions comments or any tips to add please let me know let the people know down in the comments below and like subscribe it's always appreciated so as always stay safe and i'll see you guys around take care

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 18,196

Keywords: Maya, V-Ray, Substance Painter, Texturing, 3D, apply, workflow, image, maps, plugin, automatic, automation, link, easy

Id: WEmbV7PYJvs

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021