Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 - The Modding Dungeon Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Modding General PBR materials workflow understanding in DOS2

Hi community o/

First of all, apologies if this has been talked before. I found useful information in some old threads, but there are some big changes from dos1.

Old reference, but still useful to understand how nodes works (thanks Norbyte); http://larian.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=545431

Now I'm trying to learn the workflow/pipeline Larian used for dos2. If any technical artist from Larian or the community is reading this, plz tell me if I'm correct with the naming of the textures/maps.

Exploring the material editor I found they are using now a PBR rough/metallic workflow. This is what I found for now;

BM = Basecolor map (Albedo)

BMA = Basecolor Map + Alpha

NM = Normal map

PM = Physical map (this texture contains different maps for PBR represensation);

* Red channel = Metal Mask (metalness workflow)
* Green channel = Roughness (microsurface)
* Blue channel = Cavinity/AO? not confirmed yet.

GM = Glow map (confirmed)


If there is anyone else working on this, we could try to keep all the information together on the forums or keep the wiki updated.

/wave
ISVRaDa

I'm very interested in understanding this as well. Usually with PBR based texturing you have a diffuse, normal, metalness or specular and ao maps. But as you mentioned they are using PM which seems to be several maps combined which makes it very hard to understand and replicate without more knowledge. I also have trouble just saving a new material, and if we could get some info about what type of dds settings they use would also help to create textures.

I believe PM stands for "Physical Map", i.e. a texture for all PBR parameters.
The R,G,B channels might be MetalMask, Roughness and Reflectance.
(Speculation based on the shader code in Shaders\DX11\PBR.shdh)

Weird to see they are not using a separate texture for AO. The post-process AO works well but most of the times you need a texture for micro-occlusion for small cracks. Some games combines the ao mask with the diffuse map but I really don't like this method (you save memory space but it's not good for PBR workflow).

@Norbyte if you want update the thread for DOS2 standards I'm willing to help if needed.

I'll continue checking things. Thanks for posting guys!

Apparently they're using this algorithm for AO:
http://research.nvidia.com/sites/de...able-Ambient-Obscurance/McGuire12SAO.pdf
It doesn't use any additional texture inputs, so that's probably why there is no AO texture.



It should probably go in a new thread (or the wiki), as the old one is for D:OS which uses a different rendering pipeline. Not sure when I'll have time to set it up though.
I'd say that the UE4 reference could be a good starting point: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased/
Their material editor is similar to the D:OS 2 one, and the docs explain the concepts quite well.

I use Quixel for PBR texturing and they have a UE4 RMA packed export setting, I'm gonna test and see if it works.

I would recommend these links for PBR documentation;

https://www.marmoset.co/posts/physically-based-rendering-and-you-can-too/

https://www.allegorithmic.com/pbr-guide






That's similar to others SSAO techniques, but with some differences. But my doubt comes because the blue channel map looks like a Cavity map (reflectance discarded. Reflectance can be controlled, usually not needed, by a constant value, default 0.5).

These days modern AO texture is more of a cavity map. Using SSAO the large AO is taken care of and you just need to worry about the smaller scale stuff in the cavities and such. What I'm trying to figure out is how they are using this map. Is most of the materials I'm exploring the blue channel is not being used.




Quixel is good too. I use Substance Painter/Designer usually, and PS if I need do something simple or hand painted.

I just got the details from one of our technical artists. I'll format it later for the wiki, but here it is already:

Ok, I was right about the blue channel but not having a shader supporting AO texture was unexpected. Maybe they created this map for another purpose, but it's not common to include this one in the final texture if you won't use it.

Thank you so much @Tinkerer for asking, really appreciated.

Hello there. Looks like this is the place of people messing around to geek out.

Back in the days (10 years ago) i was re-texturing a lot for NWN2. (Armors, Weapons, shields, placeables) My workflow was mainly Photoshop, text editor and later custom content community tools (mdb cloner), but most of the time without any 3D Editor. Now I try to understand the workflow for D:OS. I was reading partly the old reference from Norbyte, but would like to ask in my words HOWTO do this. (so maybe i get some answer, that is more easily understandable for me)

Description of NWN2 re-texturing workflow to understand where I come from:


MY QUESTIONS to understand the D:OS workflow:

• As far as i get it, D:OS handles the association of textures and mesh models via material editor (RIGHT?)
  Here are my attempts with the material editor so far:
  
  
  [img]https://www.dropbox.com/s/h884z65g46wulf0/MaterialEditor_Example.png?dl=0[/img]
  
• How do I add a tintmap / MSK to a model which doesnt have one yet?
• How, once a got a new texture, i do include / pak it into a mod without overriding anything?
• I messed with some BM-Texture and although I couldn't see any Alpha channel included, i obviously messed with the alpha as some body parts were invisible
  
  hardly visible because of lack of colors (WHY in this case just cycling few colors instead of all 35?), but the red margin i included by adding some blue in the MSK!
  [img:left]https://www.dropbox.com/s/1gg2vjb0u4prd4f/retexture01.png?dl=0[/img]
• How do i have to OPEN / SAVE the .dds in Photoshop (DXT1, DXT5, etc...)

I would like to do a tutorial / Howto but still lacking the understanding of an efficent clean workflow for D:OS. Any help. How to make easy retextures of the BM map and tint map to make a start
Any answers for my questions?

Hmm I enjoyed reading this
Been a while since I worked on the PBR system, refreshing my memory on it was a fun exercise!

@Norbyte
You'd still need data to cover AO. Specifically AO on a microscopic scale such as cracks in stone or tree bark.

@Rada Torment,
Good links and decomposition of the textures. If anyone wants more in-depth knowledge on PBR systems I would also suggest looking at Frostbite's notes and several short Unreal papers on PBR lighting. Not for the faint of heart, though

You're right that macro-occlusions are handled by the SSAO techniques.
Specular micro-occlusions can be handled by a slight modification on the Fresnel coefficient in a PBR system. This leaves diffuse micro-occlusions. You're right that this is currently not used. We opted to put other data in our free GBuffer spots for gameplay related features. Also not a fan of putting diffuse micro AO in the texture itself, but for now that's how artists work if they truly want some specific AO adjustments, but generally it's not needed.

The free channel in Tinkerer's post is just labeled AO because it's empty and supposed to be used for that. Not now, then maybe later. Our engine keeps evolving from game to game, so looking to the future is often not a bad idea during development

I had no idea about this :O there is always something new to learn and I love it

Thank you so much @Larian_KVN for coming here and talk about it. I'm excited to start working with my assets and see how they looks ingame.

Any updates on figuring out the workflow for texture/material creation? I've hit a bit of a snag trying to create a new staff weapon, which is just a simple elongated cylinder.

My model/texture in Blender:


The visual resource in game, with the material applied:



As you can see, there's some weirdness happening from point A to point B.

I'm missing the normal map / physical map, mainly because I don't know the steps required to create those. The normal map in particular seems a bit unnecessary for just a singularly red pole, so perhaps the physical map is what I need to get the texture to look right?

Hey LaughingLeader!

It's all a bit more.. complex than that . Did you created the staff? looks bit too heavy for that simple shape (252 triangles). Triangles optimization is important, even more vertices account nowadays. Once we have a good optimized mesh we need create our custom UVs, then start texturing, etc.

If I have time I would try to write a tutorial or something about the "art workflow" oriented to DOS2 (basically it works for lot of other games/engines). I'm gonna do some tests this week.

You can also contact me in Discord (Isvrada).

Ah, good call. I wasn't worried about optimizing yet, since I've been trying to figure out how to make the material look correct.

I'm still not sure what's causing this weird discoloration. No textures applied:

With textures (base, normal, physical):


In-game there's this weird dark part on the staff:

The third image here is the high poly model. Still has a darker part of the pole, though less noticable.

Short screencapture when turning around

The fact that this dark part of the staff remains when turning off the textures leads me to think it's an issue either in the mesh or my settings when exported from Blender / the GR2 Converter tool.

Any ideas?

Uhm.. it's been a LONG TIME since I last even touched a 3D modeling program(don't even know if I can use 3DS Max 2012 for anything anymore). But I'm thinking some of the triangles are perhaps flipped the wrong way, giving that weird discoloration? I remember vividly of Max doing that to me on export, or even when doing certain actions in the program and always having to flip them back. It was never the whole mesh either, just a certain part.

Seeing as nearly one side if affected, you should check out that the faces are facing(lol) the right way.

I see. Lets make a test. Whisper me in Discord and I'll export a mesh and see if my mesh has same issues ok? if not, then we will need to take a look deeper.

Good idea. I went ahead and re-made the cylinder. This mesh is as easy as can be - I just created a new cylinder in Blender and scaled it to fit the size of the original staff. Then I exported it to DAE, converted that GR2 with Norbyte's export tool, and checked it in the resource manager. Seems to have the same problem.

Blender vs. in the editor:

Here's some comparison gifs of toggling the different textures for both the high poly version and normal:

Normal Mesh
High Poly Mesh

The textures definitely seem to hide the discoloration better on the high poly mesh, though it's still there, and is more easily visible when you move the camera around.

Managed to get my own mesh with smoothing groups working properly!

Thanks to @Norbyte for all the talks we had about the topic and the support with gr2 converter.