tajen

Hi folks, I am using poliigon.com as a source for my textures. They have support for Blender, Maya, 3Ds etc, but no offical notes on 3D Coat usage. Their textures are generally a folder with 2x color maps, 1 greyscale displacement map, one normal map, a gloss map and a reflection map. See example below. My understanding is that 3D Coat smart materials do not use normal maps - correct me if I am wrong. My general usage has been: Either color in color slot, displacement in the depth position, gloss in metalness, and nothing in roughness (example has color 2 in roughness - probably does not make sense). I had a quick chat with one of their support guys who gave me the following comment: You can pretty reliably convert our maps over to the metalness format which 3d Coat wants, by simply taking our Gloss map, inverting it in Photoshop and plugging it into the roughness channel. Assuming it's not a metal material then just use a pure black color for the metalness input and it should be setup correctly. Now for normals you may need to flip the Y channel depending on what 3d coat is setup to read; opengl normals will stay the same as they are now, but directx normals will require the Y flipped. You can do this in Photoshop by selecting just the green channel of the normals and inverting it and saving. Hope that helps! Based on my understanding, I should not be using the normal map at all. I have also seen others on youtube that uses gloss in metalness, but based on his recommandation this is incorrect. He also has a comment regarding using opengl vs directx - since 3D Coat has two ways of running (gl - I assume opengl) vs dx (I assume direct x), does it actually make any difference in terms of smart material texture usage? And what is your recommended usage of the textures for the different slots? Should I use a different provider? Your help is much appreciated! Thanks, Terje

Hi folks, I am a hobby 3D coat user, and I happen to be having some troubles now and then. I was wondering if there exists any official/unoffical chat channels where I could ask, and potentially provide help to others? Thanks, Terje