import with multiple maps (think PBR) - any formats?

[andy.engelkemier]

I'm trying to think of a workflow where I work in one software, create some materials there, and when I import to keyshot the materials keep as much information as possible.
I'm just curious if that already exists. I would want at least diffuse, bump(normal), and roughness. Metallic and specular would be a plus.
Shoot, even if it just brought them all in and attached them to nothing really, I could just wire them up and save time there.

Ideally I'd create an asset in blender, then export and create the same asset in keyshot. But it would be Awesome if I didn't have to completely recreate all the materials. Sure, the map numbers will likely need to change considerably, although they seem a lot closer in the generic material. Not sure if anyone else has noticed that .2 roughness on generic is actually a reasonable number, where .2 roughness on any other keyshot material is basically rubber. Hopefully they've standardized that a bit more in KS10, but I have doubts.

Any ideas on formats that bring in multiple maps? Just trying to think of a good workflow, and so far I'm coming up a bit empty handed. Although, does Keyshot even support things like multiple UV channels? Because that may also be a bit of an issue.

[Eugen Fetsch]

Maybe I've misunderstood the question, but you can drag and drop multiple texture files into the Material Graph. From there it is easy to wire the nodes to the material.

If you work with procedural maps in Blender, you'll need to bake them into textures. There is no way to get procedural textures or math nodes from B3D into KS, as well as multiple UV channels.

Did you consider working in the same color space using Blender? If you work with Filmic, your viewport results may vary in comparison to KS. Switch to sRGB in Blender.

You may have set "Use gloss instead of roughness for materials" set in the KeyShot Interface preferences, that leads to different roughness results too.

Hope that something from all that will be helpful 

[andy.engelkemier]

Yes, you've misunderstood. I probably wasn't clear.
I'm looking to use PBR style maps in blender (or other). So I'd have diffuse, normal, roughness, etc attached to one material applied to one of the objects. Then when I import into keyshot, I would hope to have keyshot have A material with all of those maps already applied, so all I would have to do is tweak the values.
I'm guessing the answer is just plain no. You just have to create all your materials in one one place, and create them completely from scratch in keyshot as well. But I figured I'd ask.

[mattjgerard]

Yes, you've misunderstood. I probably wasn't clear.
I'm looking to use PBR style maps in blender (or other). So I'd have diffuse, normal, roughness, etc attached to one material applied to one of the objects. Then when I import into keyshot, I would hope to have keyshot have A material with all of those maps already applied, so all I would have to do is tweak the values.
I'm guessing the answer is just plain no. You just have to create all your materials in one one place, and create them completely from scratch in keyshot as well. But I figured I'd ask.

Methinks the answer is no. All the interchange plugins for keyshot have been mainly based on geometry exchange. The fact that some materials and maps come over I think is due to ease of implementing, not anything else.

I would love to see if they could integrate more with apps like Substance Painter where material creation is the main point of the app. I think the trouble is that while they have mostly figured out how to move complex geometry to and from apps (FBX for example) there is no update to the good old .MTL file that will exchange material maps (expecially procedural textures) in one package. You'd think it would be fairly simple, a matrix for each app that maps certain layers/maps to the internal system of material creation.


Also for keyshot, it would be really nice to be able to point to a folder of aptly named files (diffuse, albedo, roughness, spec, etc) and have keyshot just auto build a generic or advanced material and slot in and connect all the textures in the folders. Again, seems like a simple thing, but since it hasn't happened yet I'm sure its either tougher than it seems or hasn't been asked for. Would be great for importing stuff like Poliigon texture folders and such.

[andy.engelkemier]

Ha, well that's something that, if they opened up the doors a bit, could be fairly easily scripted via python by a talented python scriptor....or done, eventually, with great struggle with someone like me. lol
I'd like to see quite a bit more opened up there. You could do some simple tasks like renaming any material node that has a certain color assigned to it so that it matches a specific pantone color you're using. Or adding a transparent diffuse material to every material as a label, if no label already exists, to fix the GPU bug where the clown mask doesn't work without having a label on it.
Or deleting duplicate cameras, environments, etc. There are so many scripts I would want....if we had access to the things. Maybe in KS12?