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I have decided to work with Substance B2M en use the texture maps in Blender. I want to work with the PBR shaders of Cynicat Pro and connect the Substance maps into the input nodes of the PBR Shaders. I especially want to know which texture maps of Substance (base, normal, height, specular, metallic, ...) are relevant for Blender and if they have the same meaning (like the specular and metallic map) and how to connect these maps to the input nodes.

I am mostly interested in the definitions of the texture maps in both packages and whether or not they match.

After reading the blog of Jason alias @Jtheninja, I set up a node group using the Metallic Shader of Cynical Pro and connect the Substance texture maps.

enter image description here

Would this make sense for a rusted metal?

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Cynicat Pro really helped me out with explaining how you can connect the Substance bitmaps to his PBR node groups.

enter image description here

In the material node group you may notice that :

  • when importing a DirectX normal map you have to convert it to Open GL normal map
  • the roughness is corrected with power node before connecting it to the shaders (according to JtheNinja" The other thing we need to do is square the roughness value to match the range between SP and Cycles. To do that, add a math node, set it to “power”, connect your roughness map to the top slot, and set the bottom slot to “2.0”."
  • the metallic map is a sort of mask that tells blender what is metallic and what is not

This seems a very elegant setup with little fuss and very reusable. Comments ?

Now I also learned that you can download compiled Substance files from Textures.com and open these in Substance Player (free) and tweek the maps before exporting the bitmaps. This next to importing images in B2M and creating your own bitmaps. Apart from some issues with the displacement map it seems to work fine

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    $\begingroup$ Huh. I cannot distinguish diffuse or specular maps in your image. Can you explain what you are doing here? Why this way is elegant? Where you got the information from? $\endgroup$
    – brockmann
    Jan 26, 2017 at 11:14
  • $\begingroup$ these maps are in the Dielectric and Metallic Shader (product of Cynicat Pro; see also his youtube series on PBR Shaders). I think it is elegant because you just connect the Substance Maps (both for Dielectric and Metallic materials) and these maps are in fact the handles on your dashboard. And I think this way you have a full PBR workflow $\endgroup$
    – user13877
    Jan 26, 2017 at 12:26
  • $\begingroup$ I know there are nowadays a lot of people that explain PBR and construct PBR shaders but I think the approach of Cynicat Pro is fundamental and clearcut youtube.com/… IF you follow these tutorials you can build those shader yourselves or download them from Blender Market I think $\endgroup$
    – user13877
    Jan 26, 2017 at 12:32
  • $\begingroup$ Also ... with B2M you can simply download a non-seamless image texture somewhere, make it seamless, create the other maps, then import these maps in Blender and connect them to the PBR Shaders. I think that is cool $\endgroup$
    – user13877
    Jan 26, 2017 at 12:35
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    $\begingroup$ That's interesting, but I think you should name your texture nodes to help people understanding what they are (color, spec, normal, metallic mask). This would make your screenshot more readable. $\endgroup$
    – Bithur
    Jan 26, 2017 at 13:46

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