Using existing PBR (game) textures

[fizion]

Sometimes I like to do some livery designs for the games I play and it's nice to finish it off with a nice render.

While I create my textures mostly using Substance Painter it's a bit of a pain to get the existing materials of the other parts in Keyshot. In this example it's a helicopter for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Those textures all consist of a base colour, normal map and a 'COMP' file which is also called ORM file since it contains Occlussion (red channel), Roughness (green channel) and Metallic (blue channel).

Basically you have to split that COMP file into the separate channels so you can use it. In the attached screenshot a test I did. It does work but it's a lot of work for just one material. With the PBR workflow there are so many models that used those kind of packed textures which basically use the information from the RGB channels that it would save quite a lot of time if there was a simple utility node to do just this.

Like I said, I do my materials in Substance Painter and I know you can export Substance Materials and import them to Keyshot. But the livery I create is only one material. Other parts I don't touch and I won't load those textures into Substance as well mainly because Substance can't read DDS files which is annoying but a fact.

My example is just a hobby thing but it's exactly the same if you want to use some existing models with a few changed textures for a presentation or so. To tie all existing, unchanged textures this way takes a lot of time. I think it would be a great feature it's just a single node where you can just select what the channels (RGBA) are for. And to keep it simpler, if that node also has a normal/basecolour input you save even more time.

It's just a suggestion, maybe there's an easier way but for me this is the reason I don't render a lot of my liveries using Keyshot, just too much repetitive work for me. So I think a easier node/solution would also make Keyshot more usuable for a broader audience.

Another thing I noticed is that I really had to up the output on the metallic. Might have something to do with the color space from the images but within Flightsimulator as in Substance Painter those reflective dots on the outline of the heli are really visible and in Keyshot I need to bump the output to 5 as you see in the screenshot.

If there's a simpler way to get the above done I'd like to hear but it's mainly a suggestion since I think this is the only way

Keep up the good work!

Kind regards,

Oscar