Frustration - "Black" materials from my textures

[WillBellJr]

@Sam Deiter;610524

I looked at your Textures and noticed a couple of things that you could look at to give you better results.

1: For now, until you better understand the UE4 PBR workflow try and stay away from packing your Textures maps into the various channels of your RGB Textures. Now, what you are doing is correct and I am not trying to steer you away from doing it, I just feel like trying to do this now is causing you more problems than it is worth.

2: In your Roughness, Metallic and AO map Texture, the red channel has no data inside of it. I am also not sure which channels contains which map. When I use RGB Textures like Mask, I usually use a naming scheme so people can quickly identify what goes were so, Red is always Roughness, Green is Metallic and Blue is AO. Or something like that, the key thing to take away from this is to make sure you pick something and stick with it.

3: Try adding a LERP to your Roughness input and then control the amount of Roughness by setting scalar values. This way you can get most of the work done in Substance and then tweak inside UE4. No matter what software packages say, you are always going to have to do a bit of tweaking inside of the engine to get the values to look correct. This has always been the case for me no matter what engine I use.

4: I am not sure what scale you are using, but the model that you provide was minuscule when imported into UE4. Remember that UE4 uses CM as it;s default unit and you need to make sure you use the same as well.

5: With a little tweaking of the shader I was able to get your object looking correct when viewed in the UE4 level viewport. Here is a link so you can see what I did to the Material to get it to look like it does in the image.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/68719/Shader_Setup_00.png

6: Make sure you have a sphere reflection capture actor placed in your level or you are not going to see any reflections on your objects.

Please let me know if this helps or if you have any more questions.

Cheers-

Sam Deiter

Hi Sam, thanks so much for your help as well - yes, I do have concerns about the texturing packing Painter does for the AO/Rough/Metal channels.

I do admit in the material view, it can get confusing trying to remember which color channel maps to what since the texture icon doesn’t display the full name of the file in a tooltip, I usually slide the Material window aside and look content browser to see full name of the file as a reminder.

As far as the ordering of the channels, the filename denotes the order “AO (Red), Roughness (Green), Metal (Blue)” - the image I posted of the Painter export setting shows the layout.

And yes, during these tests, my scales were all over the place, I typically prefer Meters, but I didn’t pay attention to scale with this model since it was a test - I usually just scale it up in UE4.

I agree when I switch the mode to gray scale, the map looks totally white (in the thumbnail) which I would think is incorrect - I would expect some gradiation due to the AO or roughness channels!

But I did do my one test where I exported a “plain” PBR which had all the channels in separate images - same results.

I’ll see if I can get from Allegorithmic in this thread to tell me if I’m doing something wrong in Painter since I know he does great tutorials for both UE4 and Unity etc.

I will try your suggestions when I get home from work this evening.

Using Lerp was suggested earlier - maybe it’s just me refusing to let go of my belief that “PBR” should only need BaseColor, Roughness, Metal, Normal and AO (directly) and look the same across all “PBR” renderers…

This is a wonderful community, and I really appreciate the time you guys have given, helping me to figure out this issue!