Metalness, Roughness, Normal and Height

[Anonymous]

screen-shot-2017-10-22-at-191716.pngI am going from Substance Painter to Maya using Arnold 5 on a Mac.

I looked this up but did not see the answer.

Do I need to set the above maps to Raw if I the color management set as per the attached?

Does the answer change if I am using tx files instead of tiff

thank you for your help

[Anonymous]

Yes, all of those maps should be set to Raw since they needed to be treated as Linear files. If you loaded them into Maya, attached them to your material/s and set their color settings to Raw, then made .tx files, you shouldn't need to do anything else. However, if you've converted your texture files to .tx elsewhere, I cannot be certain that a gamma curve hasn't been added to them. Ideally you should always work with raw, non-gamma-corrected textures and allow the final application/renderer determine how they will be treated. In my experience, .exr files seem to be the most reliable.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @Stephen Barker, no worries...

Re: linear files, basically you want these textures to have no gamma correction or color profiles assigned to them. Since Arnold is using these textures to assign a value, gamma curves used for viewing images (such as sRGB) can mess with the actual values. This can cause major issues... especially for roughness and normal maps.

Re: .tx files, yes... you should create your .tx files using the Arnold TX Manager after you've assigned all the textures to your material and adjusted their color settings accordingly.

Re: Alpha is Luminance, yes that is correct.

[Anonymous]

Thanks @Stephen Barker
Re: .exr files, yes... set your settings as usual. The main reasons I prefer .exr files is that I never have to worry about them carrying an unwanted color profile, they're linear, they're 16-32 floating point, and they're really small when you used one of the built in compressions.

Re: conversion to .tx, yes... converting to .tx can save you considerable render time, especially on scenes with lots of textures.

[Anonymous]

thank you @Dade Orgeron

Sorry I am new to all of this:

What are linear files?

When you say 'then made .tx files' do you mean via the Arnold TX manager?

Also I have set the metalness and roughness Color Balance to Alpha is Luminance. Would that be correct?

thank you once again (like given).

[Anonymous]

@Dade Orgeron

thank you. It says reward user, not sure how many points are worth something. I did it but as I say not sure about it all.

With .exr files I still set the raw and luminance as above?

Are .exr files as efficient with Arnold as .tx or do I need to convert the .exr to .tx?

thank you very much indeed

[Anonymous]

@Dade Orgeron

Thank you for all of your help - much appreciated

[lee_griggs]

More information about using Maya 2017(+) with RAW/Color Management can be found here.

[Anonymous]

@Lee Griggs

thank you

[Anonymous]

@Lee Griggs

thank you