Frustration - "Black" materials from my textures

Development Asset Creation
21

Part of your problem is that your metallic shouldn’t be white. A metal box that is painted black is not metallic. Few, if any, metallic materials have a base color value darker than 180/255 or 70%. A metal surface that is painted, rusted, oxidized, or treated in any way, is likely no longer metallic. Anodized materials are really the only main exception.

But I created a new project, opened the advanced lighting map, put in your model and assigned the textures, and the box looked very similar to what your Substance Painter results look like. For some reason in your scene, your box does not have anything to reflect.

22

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

23

Thank Zac for assisting me with these texturing issues of mine.

It could very well be that I’m not using the advanced lighting map - my goal is mostly space games, and I’m not sure at this point yet if I would use ALM or not (as you can tell since I get stump’d early on with just getting models to look right)

So I usually always just start off with an Empty map or one of the Blueprint FPS or 3rd person etc. Again I have to say (and I do realize things have changed massively since the beginning) that in the past I would always just start with an empty map and my models looked fine when doing the same I’m doing now…

I’m also surprise to hear that for PBR texturing, a metal object shouldn’t have white specifying what areas of the model are pure metal? Yes, the texturing is very basic at this point, and frankly, I was hoping there was something that 'Alle was doing wrong with their export preset that I could report back showing issues when going into UE4.

But typically any “rust” would be denoted by “raised” (closer to white) in the Roughness map causing a reduction in “shininess” (along w/bump maps) - the metal channel would stay white from everything that I’ve learned and read? Yes you could also lower the brightness on those areas in the Metal map, but I don’t believe that’s what 'Alle and 3D-Coat does in those cases?

3D-Coat and Allegorithmic released guides on the usage of PBR example: PBR Guide #1 PDF](https://www.allegorithmic.com/system/files/software/download/build/PBR_Guide_Vol.1.pdf) & PBR Guide #2 PDF](https://www.allegorithmic.com/system/files/software/download/build/PBR_volume_02_rev05.pdf). A lot of 'Alle’s YouTube videos also state that either an object is “metal or not” (dielectric).

The fact that my model looks the way I expect in Painter tells me I did that part correctly in Painter, but since it doesn’t look correct in UE4, I’m not doing something correct there, which has been what I’m trying to figure out.

I’m close, (where I had previously thought I was done) - it could be that UE4’s interpretation of “PBR” is simply different from Allegorithmic & 3D-Coat (and what their tools are generating) - no blame on anyone, I just have to come up with a solid art path that gets my objects looking the way I’d like in UE4.

I’ll definitely try out that Advance Lighting map when I get home from work this evening, hopefully I’ll reproduce what you’re seeing.

24

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!

25

It could very well be that I’m not using the advanced lighting map - my goal is mostly space games, and I’m not sure at this point yet if I would use ALM or not (as you can tell since I get stump’d early on with just getting models to look right)

Substance painter and the advanced lighting map both use hdr cubemaps to add environment lighting. If you want to make sure UE4 and Substance painter are both matching up, it’s a good place to start. Once you have a scene or level, adding a reflection capture actor will let that environment act as the cube map and give your asset environmental lighting.

So I usually always just start off with an Empty map or one of the Blueprint FPS or 3rd person etc. Again I have to say (and I do realize things have changed massively since the beginning) that in the past I would always just start with an empty map and my models looked fine when doing the same I’m doing now…

Just make sure you have a reflection capture actor and some sort of environment or scene around the asset and it should look somewhat similar to Substance painter, a completely empty scene wont look as good.

I’m also surprise to hear that for PBR texturing, a metal object shouldn’t have white specifying what areas of the model are pure metal? Yes, the texturing is very basic at this point, and frankly, I was hoping there was something that 'Alle was doing wrong with their export preset that I could report back showing issues when going into UE4.

A black metal box like that would likely be made of flat sheets of aluminum or steel that were then bent and cut, and finally painted black. The material you are creating is metal which was painted black, which means you want the PBR values for black paint, which is a non metal. There’s no black metals, copper, steel, aluminum, brass, gold, chrome, etc, all have base color values above 180/255 or 70%.

But typically any “rust” would be denoted by “raised” (closer to white) in the Roughness map causing a reduction in “shininess” (along w/bump maps) - the metal channel would stay white from everything that I’ve learned and read? Yes you could also lower the brightness on those areas in the Metal map, but I don’t believe that’s what 'Alle and 3D-Coat does in those cases?

Rust or oxidized metal do not have the reflectance properties of metals. They are typically rough, yes, but they still don’t look like or behave like metals and should be black in the metallic map.

**3D-Coat and Allegorithmic released guides on the usage of PBR example: PBR Guide #1 PDF](3D design software, AR design software, and apps | Adobe) & PBR Guide #2 PDF](3D design software, AR design software, and apps | Adobe). A lot of 'Alle’s YouTube videos also state that either an object is “metal or not” (dielectric).
**
Just look at Figure 13, the rust is black and the raw metal is white. Yes, you should be thinking about metals and non metals as black and white, only using grey when transitioning between rust and no rust for example.

It could be that UE4’s interpretation of “PBR” is simply different from Allegorithmic & 3D-Coat (and what their tools are generating) - no blame on anyone, I just have to come up with a solid art path that gets my objects looking the way I’d like in UE4.

Nope, they are pretty much the same, that’s why when using the advanced lighting map so that UE4 and Substance painter are both using an environment map to light an asset, they look pretty much the same.

26

Okay guys, from what I can see, this last problem of mine as expected was my fault - turns out, the size of the Reflection Sphere wasn’t totally covering my scene! DUH!

Somehow it had got scaled down to just a little bit larger than the widget icon itself (~60 for the radius); once I increased it to cover the scene, my metal objects started looking correct again! (I ended up pulling out the sphere and going with a reflection box since it better matched the scene anyway.)

http://www.willbelljr.net/public/unreal/CorrectedReflectionSphere.jpg

This worked correctly with a totally new and empty map; I even pulled out the animated sky and all the lights (totally black background) and with a single bulb, the metals looked good. I eventually added back in the orange sky seen in my test scene above.

In my quest to see if I could get from Allegorithmic to take a look at my problem here, I discovered that someone over on their forums was having the same issue](Adobe Support Community). Another good tidbit of information on import / export configuration was Here](https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Unreal+Engine+4).

Hopefully this will help if anyone also stumbles across this issue in the future and looks for help…

The reflection probe HAS TO cover all the (metal) objects in you scene if you want them to look correct - just seeing that mirror ball in the viewport and thinking that is enough (like I did) will have you scratching your head like I was. You have to make sure it’s covering the scene!

My textures work fine as exported when everything is simply connected in the material setup - as I would have expected for a PBR material.

So what I was taught here earlier in this thread about the SRGB / Linear Color or Grayscale settings were correct after all, it was my not paying attention to the Reflection Sphere settings that got me in trouble again with my additional testing - LESSON LEARNED!

27

I turned off sRGB but the same problem here - metallic black. I can resolve it by sphere reflection capture or multiplying linear color texture of metallic by decrease coef (gear vr project)

28

open your mesh in mesh editor
on top click “Reimport Base Mesh”
that’s it
That fixed my problem

29

Thanks to all the posts here, I had the same issue with black Static Meshes in UE 4.26.1. I exported a Mesh with a Material (Metallic = 1) and UV-Map from Blender to FBX.

After import to UE, without light rebuild, all seem to be normal. After Lighting rebuild, the meshes went to black.