PBR textures from 3D-Coat to Octane

[grimm]

3D-Coat devs have added PBR painting to the program and I wanted to move the materials into Octane to render. I have found a fairly ok technique to bring them in but if anyone can improve on it that would be awesome.

3D-Coat has two PBR workflows to generate the texture images. The first one is a "Gloss/Color Specular" and outputs gloss and specular maps which works well for Octane. The second is "Gloss/Metalness" which does not come across very well. I found Roeland's metal texture node that simulates Fresnel reflections with a fall-off node. The details are here:

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=33213

I did a simple metal texture in 3D-Coat with the gloss/specular workflow and plugged the images into Roeland's node. To have it work for what I needed to do I added input pins for diffuse, roughness, and the normal maps. I hooked up the diffuse and normal maps as normal. I plugged in the color specular into the specular slot. The gloss map was plugged into the roughness pin and I checked the invert checkbox.

To get the right color I had to change the gamma for the diffuse and gloss/roughness to 1 instead of the normal 2.2. Is this because of Octane's linear workflow? Here are the results I got:

3D-Coat:

Octane results:

Any suggestions to improve this would be most welcome.

Jason

[grimm]

Next I wanted to do a mixed texture with both metal and a non-dielectric material, in this case I added a paint texture over the metal. I left the metal alone and added a mix node for the glossy paint texture. In 3D-Coat I changed the PBR mode to gloss/metalness so I could output the metalness texture. I then used that texture to control the mix node as a mask. This worked pretty well:

3D-Coat:

Octane results:

Again any suggestions for improving the texture would be great. Here is Roeland's node for metal textures that I modified, just copy the text and paste into Octane to recreate the node:

Code: Select all

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<OCS2 version='2220002'>
 <graph id='1' type='1' name='clipboard'>
  <graph id='2' type='1' name='PBR Metal' position='449 167'>
   <node id='3' type='20005' name='diffuse' position='203.722 189.027'>
   </node>
   <node id='4' type='20002' name='Float in' position='405 71'>
    <pin name='input'>
     <node id='5' type='6'>
      <attr name='value' type='8'>6 0 0</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
   </node>
   <node id='6' type='20005' name='Color' position='479 128'>
   </node>
   <node id='7' type='20005' name='roughness' position='684 64'>
   </node>
   <node id='8' type='20005' name='normal_map' position='686.647 177.245'>
   </node>
   <node id='9' type='50' name='Falloff Texture' position='360 130'>
    <pin name='normal'>
     <node id='10' type='6'>
      <attr name='value' type='8'>0 0 0</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
    <pin name='grazing'>
     <node id='11' type='6'>
      <attr name='value' type='8'>1 0 0</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
    <pin name='falloff index' connect='4'/>
   </node>
   <node id='12' type='16' name='Metal' position='511 292'>
    <pin name='diffuse' connect='3'/>
    <pin name='specular' connect='13'/>
    <pin name='roughness' connect='7'/>
    <pin name='index'>
     <node id='14' type='6'>
      <attr name='value' type='8'>1 0 0</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
    <pin name='normal' connect='8'/>
    <pin name='opacity'>
     <node id='15' type='31'>
      <attr name='value' type='6'>1</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
    <pin name='smooth'>
     <node id='16' type='11'>
      <attr name='value' type='1'>1</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
    <pin name='edgesRounding'>
     <node id='17' type='6'>
      <attr name='value' type='8'>0 0 0</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
    <pin name='filmwidth'>
     <node id='18' type='31'>
      <attr name='value' type='6'>0</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
    <pin name='filmindex'>
     <node id='19' type='6'>
      <attr name='value' type='8'>1.45 0 0</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
   </node>
   <node id='13' type='38' name='Mix Texture' position='449 211'>
    <pin name='amount' connect='9'/>
    <pin name='texture1' connect='6'/>
    <pin name='texture2'>
     <node id='20' type='31'>
      <attr name='value' type='6'>0.8</attr>
     </node>
    </pin>
   </node>
   <node id='21' type='30007' name='Colored metal (out)' position='500 360'>
    <pin name='input' connect='12'/>
   </node>
  </graph>
 </graph>
</OCS2>

Thanks,

Jason

[glimpse]

Now that's looking nice, Jason.

I'm curious does the same applies for other simillar software too? (quixel suite, substance designer/painter, etc.)
I find quite hard to transfer the same looks to Octane from those programs..looking forward to try this! =)

[gordonrobb]

Not sure if this is the same issue as using maps from DDO. DDO, by defualt, gives a glossy map. This is inverted so shiny bits are lighter. Also, if you pick an export method that gives you a roughness map, it rarely cooncides with Octanes maps, so you have to tweak the contrast and overall brightness.

[grimm]

Now that's looking nice, Jason.

I'm curious does the same applies for other simillar software too? (quixel suite, substance designer/painter, etc.)
I find quite hard to transfer the same looks to Octane from those programs..looking forward to try this! =)

Thanks Tom, I'm trying to get the workflow nailed down. I would imagine that this would work with the other programs as well. Please share your results if you can, I would love to see them.

Jason

[grimm]

Not sure if this is the same issue as using maps from DDO. DDO, by defualt, gives a glossy map. This is inverted so shiny bits are lighter. Also, if you pick an export method that gives you a roughness map, it rarely cooncides with Octanes maps, so you have to tweak the contrast and overall brightness.

I'm not familiar with DDO, but 3D-Coat also just gives you a glossy map. It's my understanding that glossy and roughness are the same with PBR. So I have been plugging in the glossy map into specular and roughness. Then I just invert the map for roughness. Is this the right way to do it?

Jason

[lukas8410]

Hey guys this topic is interesting for me also. I see that some time have passed since Your last posts, and wondering if You came up too even better solutions lately? Maybe something for Octane for c4d?

Cheers
Lukasz

[ivankio]

I'm under the impression we could use the "metalness" workflow and enjoy also substance designer if we could input a corrected texture to the float index of refraction. Is it plausible?

I use the parameter a lot in archviz where most objects have only one material. More than specular. But when an object like a character has mapped materials, mix materials get too tangled. I couldn't find a way to connect a texture channel to IOR inside Maya. Is there any?

[bepeg4d]

Hi ivankio,
currently, you cannot control the IOR with a map in Octane, but you can use a grayscale map in the amount of a mix material with two different IOR material to have different materials on the same object.
ciao beppe

[grimm]

Hey guys this topic is interesting for me also. I see that some time have passed since Your last posts, and wondering if You came up too even better solutions lately? Maybe something for Octane for c4d?

Cheers
Lukasz

This will entirely depend on your workflow. I'm not familiar with c4d, but I have noticed with 3D-Coat that it can make texturing much more simple than the usual methods. This might help you as well ivankio.

In the past I have kept the different textures separate from each other, but as you try and get them to look more and more realistic, that becomes a problem. The node tree gets huge and cumbersome to deal with, etc. With 3D-Coat, and probably other such programs (substance, DD0, etc.), you can mix as many different textures together as you want, there is no limit. Then when you are done all of the textures get dumped or merged into a single texture map with the usual components (diffuse, glossy, metalness, etc). This does mean that you are reliant on these programs if you need to change the texture, which might be an issue for you. You definetely can't take the textures from 3D-Coat and then rearrange it with any other program because of this merge of all the textures. I haven't found it much of a problem with 3D-Coat as it supports layers and it's easy to even completely redo a texture, even complicated ones.

Some of the advantages I have found are, you don't need a huge node tree. It gives you the ability to create really organic textures that look much more realistic. It makes it easier to create unique textures for similar objects. You can easily separate dielectric and conductive textures using the metalness map as a mask. With 3D-Coat you can create other masks that work well too, like for dust.

How this will integrate with c4d I'm not sure, but I have found that it integrates easily with Blender, but YMMV. Hope this helps.

Jason