Hey guys. I just made a blender add-on which allows you to import sbsar file, turning parameters in Blender and generate material based on your workflow.
Here is some preview:
Sublender also supports group and visibleIf for input and other features. You could get almost official support from it. It’s very designed to be easily used.
It’s still in beta now, but it’s stable enough to do some explorer now. I’ve already uploaded some videos.
If you find it useful, you can now get it with 30% off on gumroad
Hey friend. Really nice Addon you did, it integrates pretty good with substance.
A suggestion would be have an extra panel to tweak right from the panel the material(in Blender) properties, like heigh,normal intensity and most important. A mapping node. I found some height range and normal sliders,but they didn’t work for me. I’ll be trying some more later
I Found some “Unwanted” behaviors. When you change the resolution, it doesn’t update in cycles, i had to change to EEVEE to see the difference. I don’t know if it could be a Blender bug. And you should have a mechanism to stop spawning a new instance of sbsrender if there’s another one working, or this will happen.
But the addon is awesome already and i know it’s in begin state.
About the tweak panel, it was planned, it should be available soon. Mapping node will be added soon(I’m actually not familiar with it )
About the resolution part, did you re-render texture manually after you changed, or enable the live update option, if it’s last case, that was designed to, I thought people might want do re click render for size changes, because it would take more time to render 2k, and user might want to tweak other settings. I will document it asap, and add an option for that.
and the instance part, I actually add a mechanism to stop the previous sbsrender process,it’s useful when dragging slider or changing the colors, it looks like something is wrong .I’ll fix that asap!
I’ve been testing for some more time now, and there’s a new list of suggestions. I know it’s in early stages, but I really like this addon as I tried to do the same a year ago xD.
About the instances, I noticed one sbsrender per texture, so I think that may one of the reasons of so many instances BUT, I noticed when I have the “live reload” ON and I Click in “Render Texture” a new set of these will be spawned. So we found the first problem.
About the mapping node,it’s not that hard to add it to the node tree and control them, I did something similar some time ago,and it’s pretty easy.
OFC there’s differente workflows, but Wes from Allegorithmic made recently a workflow with SD->Blender and there’s some ideas behind the node setup
About the suggestions I thought :
When selecting the “Engine” It’s not clear enough, I do understand that they are the options to call the SAT, but in most cases people will be rendering with CPU instead of GPU, and it takes A LOT of more time. If there was sometihg like sse2(CPU) , d3d11(GPU) would be more informative
Some configuration exporting images. I mean it’s really cool to not worry about the images itself, but I found the textures saved through an hidden folder with uuid to separate them, but in no time that structure will grow and use a HUGE amount of HD. Maybe give them an option to manage that, or the option to append the project or even save in a texture folder in the same directory of .blend file.
Ambient Oclusion - When generating the AO images,it should be mixed with the base color node. So the AO could be handled
*Other outputs like Subsurface and AO could be handled, I Saw your wrapper works pretty good, and the time it exports the output, when building the node tree it could recognize which output were generated and build the node tree automaticaly. I Mean, every tweak in node tree could be done by anyone after importing, but these custom outputs weren’t imported to Blender.
I believe if there’s anyway to see which textures would be exported from sbsar file, give the option to choose would be NICE
I hope you don’t find this a bad thing, I liked the addon so much, I’m just giving some tips to make it better. But it’s up to you, It’s really nice Already
PS: I just realized you are new here in BA, Welcome!!! If you need some help with addon or test, don’t hesitate in ask me!
Wow, Thanks for your advises!
The reason that I render each texture in a standalone sbsar process, is that it’ll speed up the whole render process, and it make a chance to notify user a texture is rendered, but it should quit after the texture rendered. I did experience some scenarios that the sbsrender keeps living in the background, but it’s hard to reproduce, it will be great if you could provide a sample of your testing sbsar.
Here is a video record shows that the sbsrender process quit after render in both manual and automatic way.
About the mapping node here is what I got, is that correct? (I’m a really bad blender user ). Below is what I thought about the material control you mentioned before.
(Oh god, I have to combine them manually to upload it)
I actually thought about that, one thing about blender is that you can edit a blend file before saving it to disk, so there is no same directory , I will investigate it deeply to provide a better solution.
The workflow part has already been planned, I did write a ToDo-Workflow in the README.md(technically it should be a TODO.md) file in the zip.
About the Mapping Node. It’s basically this. You can also use the Object instead of UV.The difference is the UV output uses the object’s UV map and the “Object” kinda “projects” the material in the mesh. Similar to what SD does. Of course,it won’t work in some cases in complex materials that uses like “edges” in SD because the SAT only converts Images. But the mapping node,I suggest you experiment a little to get used to, Blender is really easy to use.Would be nice to choose from one of those, I did before in an Old project I will look for.
About the directory saving, I think an option would be “packing” inside Blender, that will save the files inside the .blend file, making things portable. But it could become a huge Blender, BUT it is an option. The user could choose maybe. Some things could be good not to overthing and allow the user choose what fits the best
And that series from Wes on how to use Blender and SD, are good to have an starting point. Of course the Workflows may differ, but it’s a start ins’t it?
As you said you are not so familiar with Blender I did an example of which node tree I like to use. Of course it only applies to me, but you can se some examples to have your ideas.
Unfortunately the BA has a limit, so I uploaded in this link. Feel free to ask me anything
After testing on my pc, the problem occurs. And I think it’s not caused by sbsar itself, but render time, 4k takes a very long time, and those sbsrender process don’t quit before rendering finish, which is a HUGE problem.
The simpliest option would be everytime you start baking the textures, first it delete every other process running. OR you could not allow to re-render while you are already rendering something, but it will break the live reload thing
)
.I’ll fix that asap!
). Below is what I thought about the material control you mentioned before.
