There has been a lot of hub hub about how to use allegorithmic suites in order to make stuff for Sansar.
While I find allegorithimic suite a very good tool and with some powerful features , You could say that I am kinda of a Substance painter hater.
I are more into archiviz, and photorealistic raytracing and rendering pipeline.
I make My own textures for My shaders as I master that, and using VRay, Maxwell render, Mental Ray, and Iray renderers , PS and Zbrush, My approach to texture work is different.
That being said this post is made to help those who are not texture artists, to understand a little more on how to make Your textures in a non destructive manner so to be capable of USING THEM not only for Sansar, but SL, VRay, IRay, Mental Ray, Unreal engine, Unity, Cry engine and whatever uses maps to make shaders.
ALSO very few know that a LOT of the work You have in SL does NOT need to be retextured from scrap and can be easily converted to a PBR material plugged in into a substance.
So You can either convert Your old stuff, or make new stuff and adapt it for any other old work, or use it on other situations very fats and very efficiently.
I wold strongly recommend even if You are a dilettante to try to follow a model that is used commonly by professionals CG artists who dont even necessarily even consider making any of their content for gaming, but nevertheless allows You to work in a professional way, and then use Your professional graded stuff for gaming.
1.If You are mental Ray Vray or use any other renderers that allow u to bake to texture, even Turtle make sure that You bake ur coverage alphas of every single material on ur object, sou can identify on the spot every single shell on Your UVs
On Sansar apparently there are no limitations to the amount of what formally for SL users is know, materials can be applied to an object...
What You know as materials for sl with a limit of 8, is basically commonly known as a colour ID, which one colour represents ONE UV map.
so in the example of an umbrella, you could have eg a red lambert for, the nylon, a blue lambert for the chrome metal, and a green lambert for the wood handle.
NO matter if u make 3 separate uv maps for each part , or one single UV for all , just make sure that, You bake an alpha channel eg coverage, because You can simply use that for masking Your UV shells ready for, dialelectric, metal gloss roughness and so on which will be handy for You, later on .
rebaking will take u very little time and u will NOT need to even bake in big render settings as all u need is a mask.
IF YOU WISH TO CONVERT YOUR OLD STUFF TO PBR FOLLOW THIS LINK
(you will need B2m https://www.allegorithmic.com/buy/download)
TUTORIAL is here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwBstFgTWAo
No matter what You do, whether converting old bitmaps, or making new substances, and You dont ONLY crate for Sansar but for sl or archiviz, advertising, or simply like to use many different renderers for passion,
Then follow this link so for You to learn how to prepare and PBR shader/material u have made, ready to go and use in Vray one day or mental Ray, or a SANSAR ready phong in a non destructive manner
in this tutorial You will see how to adapt maps u crated Via Ddo or Painter or converted Via B2M to stingray shader ready to go, on the fly in MAYA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOZ-Sbnr7qU
I strongly recommend for You to get familiar with turtle render engine and if u on low budget and not have it yet, get NVIDIA mental Ray which is now free plugin for maya, for single frame production, it will help You a lot to set UP IES lights, use substance maps prepare ur scenes with this new RT viewport engine, so for u to be capable to make large experience layouts with as free render engine, directly in maya or 3DS, thus by passing the unfriendly, unprecise, and very slow building built in features of Sansar.
mental Ray even with the old biased version , to me has always been My preferred render engine for exterior scenes where I didnt want to opt for IBL but for that particular case opted for sun sky system.
I also recommend for those who have robust skills with photoshop to consider Quixel suite, Ddo and Ndo especially are fantastic and allow you to have much more control with PHOTOSHOP tools so to combine each program's powerful features together
1.I hope this will be helpful to many SL content creators for them to save time, and l will soon post something about IBL, sun sky systems and proper HDRI calibration using Nuke, as soon as GI will show up here and there will be a particles generated environmental system instead of static cube maps as are currently used here.(* eg static ugly clouds and sunsets)
2.how and why to opt for IBL HDRI or set up proper sun sky systems and lighting to make Your experience realistic, and to get those leaves on your plants be translucent,(*if as it ought to, will be supported in Sansar GI)
cheers
