[Materials] Metal/Roughness PBR Setup?

[Darkheron]

So, I am addicted to this application, and am really looking forward to the release of the Source2 SDK at some point. In the meantime I am getting a handle on Hammer workflow with my various tools. It is going really well, but I am having a couple of problems.

1: I am used to a Metal/Roughness PBR setup when texturing, but I cannot for the life of me get it to work correctly. Specifically, I am checking the "Specular" and "Metalness Texture" checkboxes, that give me access to the Metalness texture and range settings.But they seem to do literally nothing at all, at least with the Vr Standard shader. And I have this Reflectance Lighting texture that I am not sure what to do with. In short, what workflow should I be using for textureing inside of Hammer? Is there some documentation?

2: Lighting types. light_directional, light_omni, and light_spot seem to work as I expect, but there are a slew of other lighting types that either don't seem to do anything (like light_ambient, light_environment seem to add nothing to the scene) or I don't know thier purpose. I am sure that I am doing something wrong, but I can find no documentation on the source 2 lighting. Is there any?

3: How to go about compound collision shapes. I keep coming across situations where exact mesh would be too expensive, but a single convex hull is not granular enough. Are compond colliders possible like in Bullet? Can anyone point me to some documentation on this?

4: Are the conversion rates listed here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dimensions still valid for Hammer2? I am having a rough time with scale. I modeled some OSHA type handrails based on real world measurements, and the conversions listed on that page, but the models seem to be a bit small. ( yes, scale was applied.)

PS: If anyone from Valve reads this... the Hammer menu item Help is a lie. And where should bugs be reported:? Through the console->Bug Reporter?

Thanks folks. DH

[Ṭoyoka]

Hey Darkheron, I'll try and answer your questions from my experience with the Source 2 tools.

1: Metal and Roughness require their own greyscale maps to be useful which are generally created with an external tool. You would use it in conjunction with a material you created in something like Substance Designer or from a hand-made texture created in Photoshop. Metalness controls the smoothness and reflectance of the material, specularity controls the intensity of light hitting the material. You will likely not get much use out of these properties without the proper maps and textures.

2: A lot of the entities in Source 2 Hammer have been ported from Source 1 and many of them are deprecated. If there is no noticable visual difference in the 3d view, it likely does not work. This of course can't be said for all entities (as some require in-game testing), it's safe to say that a good chunk of Source 1 or GoldSource entities do not work.

3: See https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dota_2_Workshop_Tools/Modeling/Model_Troubleshooting . Although this is stated in the Dota 2 part of the wiki, this can apply here as well, I believe.

4: From the looks of it, the "player" in Destinations seems to be a bit taller than in Source 1 games. Not sure if this is totally correct. Don't take my word for it!



Bugs should be posted in this forum, as the developers are actively looking here for feedback. The Bug Report tool in the console (as far as I know) does not work.

[Darkheron]

Thanks for the reply:

1: Yeah, I'm an avid user of Substance Designer and have been since it was called MapZone :) Thus all the textures I have created originate from bakes within SD5. The problem is that the Metalness map in particular seems to have no effect in a hammer material. BaseColor, Normal are fine of course, but the rest of the settings inside of material editor are confusing me. It is like some kind of a mish-mash of Specular/Gloss workflow and Metal/Roughness workflow that I haven't been able to grasp yet. The problem could also be attributed to improper light setup which is why I also was curious about the functions of the other light types. I was just kind of hoping someone knew of a basic setup and workflow that worked well and produced accurate results.

2: Ok, so just because an entity is available inside of the editor... doesn't means it is meant to be used in this version of the editor? Hmm gonna be tough to troubleshoot and look for bugs then :)

Thanks again.

[Ṭoyoka]

I figured you used SD, just wanted to be sure in general! Sorry, I must have misinterpreted your initial question in that case. The workflow does indeed seem to be a bit of a mish-mash. I guess that's why it's in Early Access The different maps can be adjusted, if I recall correctly, such as blending metalness and other material properties. This can be done with some material types (ie. vr_standard) but not others.

If you're talking about lighting in the material or model editor, there is (unfortunately) no lighting preview in these editors. You'll have to test your assets with lighting in the Hammer map editor or in-game when working on it (sorry if I misinterpreted this as well!). Note that you can modify your materials while in-game or in the Hammer map editor, and the material will update on-the-fly when you save, so you don't have to restart or anything.

But yea, the tools are in a sort of strange state at the moment. Lots of excess stuff in the editor that no longer works or isn't meant to be used yet. This has been the case for the Dota 2 tools too, ever since its release roughly a year ago!

Anyway, good luck :)

[Vicxvr]

Darkheron, I am a new user of SD and I am looking at the same stuff as you. I was surprised how well PBR gloss/spec from SD actually worked considering that Source 2 is not PBR anything as far as I know.

In the whole it will be a case of building a graph that works. It might be useful to look at some vmats for CS:GO textures because you woud imagine that the renderer in Destinations has more in common with CS:GO (trying to be realistic) than with Dota2 (art-style with rimlight etc).

People who have CS:GO assets (I don't have any) could bring them into Destinations and let us know if they render the same.

[Darkheron]

It is definitely a Specular/Gloss workflow. Where .. from a SD perspective:
Diffuse = Color
Normal = Normal
Specular Map = Lighting/Reflectance
Glossines Map = Lighting/Gloss

Seems to be working pretty well now that I just switched up workflows. The bad thing is almost all of my core materials are done with a Metalness workflow.... the good thing is SD5 includes a basecolor_metallic_roughness_converter node to switch from metal/rough to specular/gloss. Whew :)

A tip: in case anyone else using SD happens along: Change the id's of your output nodes to:
- color for Difuse
- refl for Specular
- gloss for Glossiness
EDIT: Adding ids for other types of output nodes that Hammer Material Editor can use.
- trans for Opacity
- metal for Metalness Texture
- selfillum for Emmission
- mask for Tint Mask ( not sure what this does yet )
- ao for Ambient Occlusion
- gradient for a World Lighting Gradient ( not sure what this does either )
- lightmap for a custom lightmap.

That way the files you export are named such that the material editor will automatically give you the right set of maps when you try to open them from the related sections in the editor. IE, if you go to open a reflection map, files appended with _refl will automatically be shown, and by setting the id of your specular output node to refl... this appenndage will occur when you "Export outputs as bitmaps" . Otherwise it gets pretty irritating pretty quickly.

[Ṭoyoka]

Good stuff Darkheron, glad you got it figured out!

[Darkheron]

Things are going well, with the exception of very highly reflective materials like chrome. I cannot figure out how to make a simple chrome sphere render correctly. Does anyone know the correct Color/Normal/Specular/Gloss and light setup for chrome to display correctly? I am thinkinng the material needs a correct cube map associated with it but I don't know. Any examples anywhere?

[Vicxvr]

I have only used the environmental cubemap technique from inside Hammer. You place the env_cube entitity and then you right-click on it and select the render texture option.

Pretty sure you have to manually create the texture with this right-click method because building the map doesn't update the texture automatically (correct me if wrong).

Still the results from an env_cube are not that pleasing in VR.

[Ṭoyoka]

Vic, you can build the cube map while you're in-game. There should be a console command such as "build cubemap" or something of that sort that creates an appropriate map.

[Steve]

Originally posted by Vic:

Darkheron, I am a new user of SD and I am looking at the same stuff as you. I was surprised how well PBR gloss/spec from SD actually worked considering that Source 2 is not PBR anything as far as I know.

In the whole it will be a case of building a graph that works. It might be useful to look at some vmats for CS:GO textures because you woud imagine that the renderer in Destinations has more in common with CS:GO (trying to be realistic) than with Dota2 (art-style with rimlight etc).

People who have CS:GO assets (I don't have any) could bring them into Destinations and let us know if they render the same.

?? source2 does support pbr, and it actually isnt closer to csgo. It uses an entirely different render'r and set of shaders.

[Zynaps]

I think this is a limitation in the "VrForward" renderer that is used in Destinations, most likely it has the same capabilities as the Unity render in The Lab (single pass forward). You have to wait until they release their non-vr "FPS" renderer sometime in the (far?) future if you want to play with PBR and real GI.