Substance Designer vs. V-Ray materials

[henryeastman]

In terms of quality, will you get better results with 3ds Max V-Ray using substance designer materials through a V-Ray material or the various maps within 3ds Max and a V-ray material.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Chris MacDonald]

What?

[henryeastman]

All I want to know is which work flow is better for architecture and interior design, substance designer or material creation natively in max.

 

Thanks

[Francisco Penaloza]

What?

 

lol

[Francisco Penaloza]

All I want to know is which work flow is better for architecture and interior design, substance designer or material creation natively in max.

 

Thanks

 

you are rendering with V Ray so when more time and dedication you put in the creation of the material inside V Ray the better they will look.

Working with Substance designer may help you on being consistent in the creations of maps such, Reflections glossiness and Displacement, etc etc. That otherwise are kind of tricky to create with Photoshop and honestly not many people take the time to produce them right.

In that case, yes Substance designer may help you. but this does not meant it will be an instant super shader solution.

[henryeastman]

Haha, let's all laugh at the noob!

 

But seriously, thanks for your reply. So what you're saying is that designer is basically a map creator. So however great looking you make your material look inside of substance, you will still have to do work on it inside of max to make it look tip top for V-Ray.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Well substance designer is a little more than a map creator, the 'problem' is that V-Ray does not manage the materials the same way. Actually they are just now working to create or make it compatible with the new gen materials or PBR which was develop for game engine not for ray tracer engines.

So far for example, the roughness map is no useful at all inside V-Ray, because V-Ray manage reflections and glossiness in a different way.

That's why I mentioned it won't be a straight export.

It will help?

sure for what I mentioned earlier.

 

It will make your materials looks better?

it Depend of how you create them inside V-Ray.

[RyderSK]

Substance/Quixel export just fine to Vray, they all offer different 'conventions' ( metalness or specular workflow ), so you pick the ones that suit you.

 

Material is Material regardless where the texture inputs came from. If you create them manually yourself in Photoshop, or use procedural generator, it's still only bitmap. You can use Substance tools in any way you want, take only parts of it, combine it with anything else.

 

Quality, in either case, still depends purely on your skill. You can think of Substance as procedural Photoshop, just another tool. The one you are more proficient within will give you better textures. And then using those textures to create complex shader depends on another skillset altogether.

 

( small pevee :- ) PBR isn't from game world, it's buzzword created by Disney. It's only a coincidence real-time engines like Unreal were much quicker and thorough in implementing it than offline raytracers. Vray and all the other big players thought they are physically correct (plausible should be better term) because they follow energy preservation and stopped any research there, but there is so much more to it. Vray, up till now (along with Corona and tons of others...) had quite weird (shiny...) fresnel, often odd brdf model, clipped glossiness/roughness range,etc...

[henryeastman]

Thank you for your informative reply.

 

I always thought V-Ray was physically based long before Unreal etc. Has unreal just taken it further with the metallic/roughness work flow? I understand that V-Ray is more spec/gloss. If you created a specular and glossiness map in substance, are these directly related to reflection and reflection glossiness respectively within V-Ray?

[RyderSK]

Spec/Gloss can still have different calibration for each software that uses the convention. Vray/ Corona/ Unity3D/..

 

But if you use GGX brdf in VrayMtl, it should match. The result will be 100perc. consistent only with the VraylAlMtl (which Vlado coded from open-source Arnold's AlSurface shader, based on Disney's PBR), which currently isn't complete.

 

The whole Metallic workflow is only more convenient, it doesn't give any different result at all. It's just more artist-friendly (and easier on real-time engines because it needs one less map). But I really wish it would become 'THE' standard, so we can use the same textures across every application.

Imagine one-click button from Vray/Corona/etc.. to Unreal4 ? That would be the benefit. Devs just need to stick to one standard, and kill the spec/gloss. Or do like Redshift did and support both ( Redshift has 'invert glossiness' checkbox so you can convert textures little bit easier).

 

Regarding physically based crap, yes, all the offline renderers were. But new guys on the market just took it farther. Other example of this is that in Vray, Blinn is still the default BRDF model, not GGX. And the fresnel doesn't correctly behave with rough materials. So you have to pull some potato numbers out of your ass in order to clamp the specularity to avoid shining supermario bros look on your shaders. With correct fresnel, you set the specular level to 1 (255) and IOR to 1.333-1.52 and never touch it again. It will work for every (non-metallic) shader, at any glossiness/roughness. Imho this is not geeky stuff, this is another level of artist-friendliness. With shader-model like this, your grandmother could create a material without any CGI knowledge. All you have to decide is how rough surface looks to you, which is eye-balling.

[Nic H]

streamlining the potato shader split would be good.

same maps out of substance painter - one to vray the other to unity - film, print and realtime from the same base assets thanks