Substance Output Nodes don't match Material Input Nodes and "Bake Outputs" isn't intuitive.

[brand_maccus]

I can't find any tutorials or I wouldn't be asking this question. I have downloaded some free Substances to improve the visual appeal of some of my experiments (procedural modeling, mostly). The Output Nodes of the various Substances don't seem to have a "one to one" match to the Input Nodes of the Materials that I'm trying to apply to the Objects I have in my Scene. Most of the options make sense, but I can't figure out many of the less obvious ones.

basecolor to Base Color Map.

roughness to Roughness Map.

metallic to Metalness Map?

Normal to Bump Map?

height to?!

Diffuse to?!

Specular to Reflectivity Map?

Glossiness to... ?!

Some of the Substances have even more options that I don't understand. I've gone to the Adobe website (that's where I got the Substances from in the first place) and the tutorials there pertain only to creating said substances, not using them in 3ds Max. I've tried searching the Autodesk documentation and I could not find anything helpful (why is all of the documentation ten years old?!).

I wanted to try "Bake Outputs" to see if I could decrease the enormous size of my Scene files after adding the Substances, but if you click on the question mark while choosing the file type options it just produces the circle with a stripe symbol. I tried Bitmap (exactly the right look), but it amounted to 96MB. I tried PNG, but all of the files came out grayscale.  I tried TIFF, but got the same 96MB result. I tried TGA, but Widows doesn't even recognize it as an image format.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I wouldn't bother y'all, but this isn't covered in the documentation (at least not well), and I can't find any pertinent information or tutorials.

[wernienst]

In theory, it should work like this:

Move a Substance2 node to the main window of the Slate Editor. Then choose "Substance" in Max' menu bar, select "Substance to Arnold". A Standard Surface material is created and all appropiate channels are being connected.

In theory.

In fact, only Normal is connected (tested with Ceramic_02.sbsar). So I connected Diffuse to base_color and Specular to specular_color manually and hit Render. I've got an image, but also the message

09/09/2023 14:52:21 - Python script execution command embedded in the current scene could be unsafe and its execution has been blocked for the current 3ds Max session: python.Init

??

There are some detailed pages on Adobe's Help site:

https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-integrations/renderers/arnold/arnold-substance-in-3ds-max.html

However, the last plugin version mentioned there is 2.4.2 (released December 2020), current is 2.4.10.

I'd say there is a lot to do...

[brand_maccus]

That is a very helpful link. Even if it doesn't address all of my questions, it's way more information than I was able to find myself.

[domo.spaji]

96 MB bitmap (BMP) file (or any uncompressed, like tiff by default) is 4096 x (2x4096) pixels resolution...

That is 4 x 4k display resolutions...

That is 16 x 2k or full HD displays...

+ I don't think you can even avoid pop-up window with settings when saving "picture" files, there you can eg. change from saving png. as default grayscale to some colored options.

[CiroCardoso3v · Accepted solution]

I don't recommend using Substances materials directly in 3ds Max. There is a bug that will make the scene crash, and not to mention how slow is to make any adjustments.

Answering your question: What you are seeing is the option to work with two of the most common PBR models - Metalness\Roughness or Specular\Glossiness. So if you are using metalness\roughness with Arnold it goes like this:

basecolor to Base Color Map.

roughness to Roughness Map.

metallic to Metalness Map

Normal to Normal

Height to Displacement or Bump

[brand_maccus]

While they have been a pain to use I get much nicer Materials than I can create myself. I have been converting the Outputs to Bitmaps so that it doesn't run so slow or crash.

Thank you.

[CiroCardoso3v]

That is the idea, yes. Export the maps you want and then do some procedural shading with that base.

[teamSP26J]

You can use substance player to convert those sbsar to PBR textures. Also Connecter can do that. Using sbsar inside max also made it crash for me.