Substance Painter's Normals diferent from Substance Designer's?

[spookydoom]

I've created a model in ZBrush and baked the maps out in XNormal because for some odd reason it didn't work in Designer 4.3.
So I started texturing my model in Designer but realized that I needed a more "artistic" approach until I had decided for a metarial and Color Setup for my model. So I brought the same model into Painter and loaded the same normals map. The weird thing is that it seems that in Painter the normals are uneven or deformed. The same effect like one would get by baking out maps in an unsuitable application and then viewing them in Unity before running them through "Handplane".

Do Designer and Painter use a different normal format from each other?

Comparison picture[dl.dropboxusercontent.com] - the screenshot from Painter is in ultra high quality.

[wesm]

Originally posted by spookydoom:

I've created a model in ZBrush and baked the maps out in XNormal because for some odd reason it didn't work in Designer 4.3.
So I started texturing my model in Designer but realized that I needed a more "artistic" approach until I had decided for a metarial and Color Setup for my model. So I brought the same model into Painter and loaded the same normals map. The weird thing is that it seems that in Painter the normals are uneven or deformed. The same effect like one would get by baking out maps in an unsuitable application and then viewing them in Unity before running them through "Handplane".

Do Designer and Painter use a different normal format from each other?

Comparison picture[dl.dropboxusercontent.com] - the screenshot from Painter is in ultra high quality.

Hello,

SD and SP are using the same tangent basis for rendering normals. I have a few questions. Did you have the resolution set to 2K in SP? Also, under quality, what was the samples per pixel setting. And finally, are you using the same shader in both SD and SP to view the model?

Thanks,

Wes

[spookydoom]

Hi Wes,

since I am not sure if I understood ALL the settings you wanted me to compare I just made another screenshot that (I think) contains all the infos you wanted. :)

Click.[dl.dropboxusercontent.com]

It looks *sort of similar* if I set Substance Designer to DirectX instead of OpenGL. Meaning - it looks absolutely correct in Designer if I set it to OpenGL tangents.
In Painter it looks pretty much correct in OpenGL but still lightly deformed as in the screenshot.
Baked in xNormal. The baker from within Designer somhow returned a blank result like the models scales were off though they weren't. I checked.

[MadMinstrel]

Related question: will Substance Painter (and/or Designer) load explicit tangents from an FBX file, or will it recalculate?

If not, can we have mikktspace as an option? .h[svn.blender.org], .c[svn.blender.org]

It isn't a big deal, as it only really affects the viewport drawing, but it'd be nice.

[wesm]

Originally posted by MadMinstrel:

Related question: will Substance Painter (and/or Designer) load explicit tangents from an FBX file, or will it recalculate?

If not, can we have mikktspace as an option? .h[svn.blender.org], .c[svn.blender.org]

It isn't a big deal, as it only really affects the viewport drawing, but it'd be nice.

Hello,

It will load the tangents from the FBX file or it can be set to recalculate. If you go to preferences > Editors > Mesh you will see as setting for "Always recompute Tangent Frames." This setting will currently recompute using the tangent basis in Unity. We will be adding more tangent basis in the future.

Cheers,

Wes

[wesm]

Hello,

I'm sorry, but I was wrong about the tangent basis. Here is the correct information.

Substance Painter and Designer *do not* use the same tangent basis when
recomputing them. Designer uses Unity's tangent and Painter uses its own. This is not ideal at this time, but it will be addressed.

Here is what we are looking to do.

1. add an option in Painter (like there is in Designer) to not recompute
the tangents and use the tangents in the model file (if any).

2. add a plugin system in Designer in Painter so that people can choose
the tangent basis they want to use.

Cheers,

Wes

[spookydoom]

Hi Wes,

thanks for the feeback.

If making a selection of tangent basis on model import is an option that would be pretty cool actually. So far most applications only give the option to use their tangent basis take it or leave it. So a selection would be highly appreciated!

I'm really looking forward to all those upcoming versions of Painter and Designer. You really seem to actually understand what makes a toolset useful even if this means testing new paths.

[MadMinstrel]

Ah, I was wondering why my tangents were still wrong. Now I can stop feeling stupid. Thanks for the update. :)

[wesm]

Originally posted by spookydoom:

Hi Wes,

thanks for the feeback.

If making a selection of tangent basis on model import is an option that would be pretty cool actually. So far most applications only give the option to use their tangent basis take it or leave it. So a selection would be highly appreciated!

I'm really looking forward to all those upcoming versions of Painter and Designer. You really seem to actually understand what makes a toolset useful even if this means testing new paths.

Being able to choose tangent basis will be great. I'm really looking forward to this as well.