Substance and Sketchup Workflow

JQL

Hi people,

Any of you guys has had any success in streamlining a usable workflow between Sketchup and Substance designer or substance painter so we could:

1 - Acurately apply substance effects through bitmap textures/procedural textures?

2 - Be able to continuously remodel the base model in sketchup and render it from sketchup?

roland joseph

Thea will soon have an amazing Substance editor/viewer.
http://thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17%26amp;p=128101#p128085
Not sure how that will effect Sketchup but it looks very promising.

Substance requires multiple layers...i.e. diffuse, relief/bump/normal, specular, glossiness,
Not sure where to start in Sketchup although a plugin that would allow assembling/mapping multiple layers and storing of their location for translation by any rendering engine would be very cool.

JQL

@roland joseph said:

Thea will soon have an amazing Substance editor/viewer.
http://thearender.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17%26amp;p=128101#p128085
Not sure how that will effect Sketchup but it looks very promising.

Substance requires multiple layers...i.e. diffuse, relief/bump/normal, specular, glossiness,
Not sure where to start in Sketchup although a plugin that would allow assembling/mapping multiple layers and storing of their location for translation by any rendering engine would be very cool.

That's the reason I'm asking. It's already available and works greatly!

It's a substance material converter that can be used to convert any kind of substance into a Thea material.

What I want to know is the best practice on how to take a model out sketchup and into substance designer/painter, and then back into sketchup with correct UV mapping so I can apply the Thea material and every procedural effect is applied to the SU model, even if it is not as a substance file but as Thea material.

Krisidious

following.

Rich O Brien

There's 2 questions/actions here...

@unknownuser said:

What I want to know is the best practice on how to take a model out sketchup and into substance designer/painter, and then back into sketchup with correct UV mapping?

In Substance Designer you work with bitmaps/uv maps so you can treat the workflow the same as any workflow where geometry inherits tileable textures.

Where you will be let down is how SU generates the maps. It tends to overlap textures on a UV space so using Designer to apply edge wear etc is a non runner.

But if you approach the uv mapping from a modular manner on an Archi model then you can achieve the desired results.

But in essence Designer is to build the texture's appearance. Painter is obviously to apply the textural position and appearance minus the procedural adaption, to a degree, to a texture.

@unknownuser said:

so I can apply the Thea material and every procedural effect is applied to the SU model, even if it is not as a substance file but as Thea material.

if you're dealing with bitmaps then the workflow is that the applied UVs positions will respect the additional procedural elements to that bitmap if the bitmap getting modified has the same dimension ratio.

Can you give a bread and butter example of your end goal?

JQL

@rich o brien said:

Can you give a bread and butter example of your end goal?

What do you mean by that?

Example of the procedure?

Example of the final effect I want to see?

Rich O Brien

I mean that I know you have a textured SketchUp model and that you are going to pipe that into Thea.

I'm asking what do you think/want Substance Designer can/to do for your workflow?

JQL

I want it to fake it and pimp it !

JQL

Ah and I want:

...

JQL

Now that I've most certainly annoyed you again, I want to be able to:

Fake things like round edges in certain materials and one of the procedurals in Substance could do that with normal maps and stuff.

I want to add moisture, moss, cracks, dirt and that sort of stuff to my architectural models, because I want my clients to understand how they age beautifully if we use good materials instead of the fake pvc, paint, aluminium panels and glossy stuff, etc... one sees in standard architecture.

I want to break every edge in my model.

I want to create materials faster than I do now.

I want to visualize everything with a real time poor quality render and know that my thea render will rock for sure.

I want grunge in particular places and add it effortless.

I want to create infinite variations of a material using substances parameters.

I want a beer.

I want to see it all in sketchup after texturing.

I want to modify my model and seamless rebake every needed texture for the magic to happen again.

I want to update my SU model easily enough so I render it with Thea again.

EDIT:

I'd also like to pick up some 3d warehouse models and make them feel natural very fast... but that is a hobby of mine.

Rich O Brien

@jql said:

I want to be able to:

Fake things like round edges in certain materials and one of the procedurals in Substance could do that with normal maps and stuff.

I want to add moisture, moss, cracks, dirt and that sort of stuff to my architectural models, because I want my clients to understand how they age beautifully if we use good materials instead of the fake pvc, paint, aluminium panels and glossy stuff, etc... one sees in standard architecture.

I want to break every edge in my model.

I want to create materials faster than I do now.

I want to visualize everything with a real time poor quality render and know that my thea render will rock for sure.

I want grunge in particular places and add it effortless.

I want to create infinite variations of a material using substances parameters.

I want a beer.

I want to see it all in sketchup after texturing.

I want to modify my model and seamless rebake every needed texture for the magic to happen again.

I want to update my SU model easily enough so I render it with Thea again.

EDIT:

I'd also like to pick up some 3d warehouse models and make them feel natural very fast... but that is a hobby of mine.

Then you will need your models to be unwrapped. This can be done extremely quickly in Blender using Smart UV project.

Export Collada. Unwrap and then apply the maps.

This way you materials are assigned to maps and in Substance you can begin the process of adding magic...

Substance needs a good unwrap to be able to extract normal maps, ao maps etc to then utilise other nodes to treat those maps as foundations to curvature maps etc...

It is an involved process. But if you are currently doing this by hand in PS then Substance speeds it up dramatically.

If you're not then keeping rubbing the lamp and the genie will eventually come out and grant your wishes.

JQL

@rich o brien said:

Then you will need your models to be unwrapped. This can be done extremely quickly in Blender using Smart UV project.

I knew it! You're earning money by selling blender copies!

As soon as you entered the discussion I knew the solution would be blended somewhere on your post replies...

Are you sure I need to unwrap my texture in Blender?

It kind of scares my doing that? Can't I just texture it in SU and shoot the model into Substance?

That is a drag, I'm already predicting stupid things happening when I alter the model after the texturing has been done!

So I have to:

1 - export it to Blender (will blendup help?);
2 - unwrap it there;
3 - export as collada;
4 - Reimport the unwrapped collada back into sketchup so I have a correct UV mapped model (will this work?)
5 - Link the collada to Substance
6 - Bake the textures into the model in Substance so I can get postional maps.
7 - Texture it there until I create the final substance;
8 - Create a Thea material from Substance using the new converter;
9 - Apply the material into the Sketchup model without breaking it's UVs...
10 - Render and remodel the model to my liking.

What now? It's no longer unwraped so I have to start it over from 1?

If so, the only step I can skip is 7 as all the creative texture work is done and baking the new model will make all stuff update through node based system...

Is this so? Can't I really skip unwrap?

If so then I hate you Rich! I was living a nice dream until you showed up!

Krisidious

you can wrap models and come back into sketchup... and render.

This is an unwrapped model in SU.

(www.mediafire.com)

roland joseph

@unknownuser said:

how to take a model out sketchup and into substance designer/painter

I am guessing that you are just kidding . The answer is of course rewrite SU entirely so that it has a multi-layer UV and an engine/algorithm to drive the substance materials. Goodluck with that one.

Krisidious

I'm happy just using Substance painter/designer in Thea/SU.

JQL

@roland joseph said:

@unknownuser said:

how to take a model out sketchup and into substance designer/painter

I am guessing that you are just kidding . The answer is of course rewrite SU entirely so that it has a multi-layer UV and an engine/algorithm to drive the substance materials. Goodluck with that one.

Nope Roland, for what I can tell, and for what Rich told here, the only thing stopping us is UV unwrapping. And also, again for what Rich told here, that shouldn't stop us anyway, because we have the ability to use Blender (well I have no ability to use Blender but I could learn or at least spend some time with it... I've got it installed for ages anyway)

The thing is you can create a substance and that substance wich might be a mix of textures procedural effects/materials that are created on specific places based on your model. So it's a model specific material based on multiple generic materials and procedurals and masks that help you position your materials and effects in the model.

Inside a gaming engine that complex stuff can be directly applied in a model as a substance file wich is dynamic and might change accordingly to actions taking place in that app, for instance, game actions like getting burned, or being fired at, or whatever...

Inside applications that don't support substance, like Sketchup, that can't be done dynamically, but the substance can be converted into a static material that fits that model alone.

This material is not a single material like wood, or steel or whatever, but it is in fact a multimaterial, with all the materials that you've created and applied to the model inside substance.

This means that it has several maps for those materials combined into one. Those maps correspond mainly to 4 things for PBR (photo based rendering):

Base Color Map (similar to diffuse or a color/texture sketchup material)
Normal Map (wich is the same);
Roughness Map (wich controls how smooth the surface looks)
Metallic Map (wich has to do with metallic effects wich are the only materials that can't be created with the above maps alone)

In this multimaterial you can also have other maps like Height, Emissive, Clip maps, etc...

This means that you can easily translate this multimaterial to any render engine and render it.

Thea as launched yesterday a converter that speeds up this material creation and works really well.

After the materila is created, you only have to fit it back into the original model, in this case Sketchup and you can render it perfectly from inside Sketchup.

The only things missing here in the gaming workflow are:

Sketchup files are not supported but you have stuff like collada and 3ds or obj;
By what Rich says you have to unwrap the model wich sketchup cannot do so you have to use blender or another UV unwrapping software;
You then have to import the model back to sketchup so it get's also unwrapped in SU;
Then you can import it to Substance and work there;
Then you can turn your substance into a multimaterial based on textures instead of procedurals;
Then you apply that multimaterial into your unwrapped model
Then render it and every effect and material falls into place.

Teorically it's simple but the workflow is not direct and that is the only thing giving me doubts...

Substance Designer has a 30 days trial though, so...