Material node improvmenets

[hamzaaa1988]

Hi,

I have been playing around with Artist Point and it’s been great so far. I really love the material support but I am missing some features there. (maybe I just missed them and it’s possible, if so please correct me)

.PSD support
At the moment it’s only possible to use bitmap files such as jpeg, png etc correct? It would be super cool if .psd as imported maps would also be supported

Alpha map support
In many cases textures are not only blended using splatmaps but in combination with an alpha channel of the texture itself. It would be really nice to have a slot for an alpha map and/or an option to read the alpha from a .psd file (e.g. from the albedo)

Thanks for your time

[Stephen]

Hi there,

Good suggestions. A few comments:

• Alpha support: This is actually already implemented internally for masked materials in the Layers, Scatter, etc devices. I just ran out of time to expose another filename slot and load mechanism. It will definitely appear in the future.

• PSD support. Can you describe more about your workflow here? Does your material contain each component as a layer, a channel, etc?

[hamzaaa1988]

Hi Stephen!

cool good to hear about alpha support. Regarding PSD in our game engine instead of saved bitmaps we use PSD files as diffuse/normal/displacement etc. It’s not a huge difference for the wokflow but it saves a step because you don’t have to save out your bitmaps. It just a tiny bit more convenient. Under the hood I don’t know how the engine interprets the psd files but I guess it just takes the collapsed file without any layer functionality. For delivery we write .dds files so this is really just the working files.

Keep up the good work

[WFab]

@hamzaaa1988 Wouldn’t an “EXR multilayer” be a better fit for that use case? It’s open source, and more versatile overall. Maybe talk to your engine guys about it?

Imho would also be a better fit with world machine. I’m envisioning a file input, plugged into a modified channel splitter, set to maybe a separate mode, or an automatic detection of a multilayer file (EXR or PSD), that will split a layered package into it’s individual layers.

Just random musings lol!