MSFS20 I'm having Difficulty with the ORM texture

[Aquilla]

I have been trying to apply an Occlusion, Roughness, Metal texture to my project with 0 success. I have tried every texture I can come up with, including some stock MSFS comp textures. No effect.
They don't show up in Blender or the Simulator and the texture map doesn't save to the texture folder when exporting the model.

I get no error messages on export either.

At this point I think I missed some setting somewhere.

I've set the material to Standard with Opaque alpha mode.
The rest of my settings are shown bellow.

Thanks

 

[rhumbaflappy]

Your metallic and roughness factors are not set to 1.0, so maybe that is a problem.

 

[Aquilla]

Thanks for responding rhumbaflappy. Setting roughness and metallic to 1 only creates a mat finish over the whole surface.

 

[mamu]

- Set material to Disabled
- Set material Msfs Standard
- Add your textures to the slots

According that you have Blender 3.6.x and Asobo plugin 1.3.3, it should work

 

[WildLynxPilot]

Do you have a proper O R M texture with the ambient occlusion in the red channel, the roughness in the green channel and the metallic in the blue channel? What exact pixel size is you texture png?

 

[Aquilla]

MaMu, I have been using 4.2 with Ronh's exporter.

So I reinstalled 3.6.4 and Asobo plugin 1.3.3, loaded the file, made sure everything was in place and there is no difference.

WLPilot I think I put together a decent O R M but as a test I tried some stock MSFS textures on my project to check. No difference.

Checking my expectations.
If this is working right and I want to have polished metal next to flat paint on the same surface, right next to each other, then the green would represent the flat paint
and the blue would represent the metal. Paint flat and dull, metal shiny and bright, while where ever there is light red you have light and where you have dark red you have darkness (occlusion), correct?

 

[WildLynxPilot]

MaMu, I have been using 4.2 with Ronh's exporter.

So I reinstalled 3.6.4 and Asobo plugin 1.3.3, loaded the file, made sure everything was in place and there is no difference.

WLPilot I think I put together a decent O R M but as a test I tried some stock MSFS textures on my project to check. No difference.

Checking my expectations.
If this is working right and I want to have polished metal next to flat paint on the same surface, right next to each other, then the green would represent the flat paint
and the blue would represent the metal. Paint flat and dull, metal shiny and bright, while where ever there is light red you have light and where you have dark red you have darkness (occlusion), correct?

No, it is not the colors red, green and blue that makes it, but what is in the channels for red, green and blue. That is a different thing. In the green channel you need a greyscale image representing the roughness of the material. Black=totally shiny, white=totally rough (not shiny). The metalness is a different set of properties and does not very much affect the shininess. Again, in the blue channel there should be a greyscale where black=no metal properties and white=fully metallic. Fully metallic does not mean shiny - you need a combination of the metalness and roughness to achive your desired look. The red channel also should have a greyscale representing the ambient occlusion details in your texture. Then these three channels have to be combined into one image, and that image then is placed in the MSFS properties Occlusion-Roughness-Metalness.

 

[WildLynxPilot]

Here is an example. This is a repeating texture of a rusty metal surface.

The first picture is the albedo (the actual color texture of the surface).

I extracted the channels from the COMP (or ORM or ARm or whatever you want to call it) image and made a combined image that shows the red channel on top left (neutral grey as there is no need for ambient occlusion details here), the green channel on the top right showing the variation in roughness (black is shiny/smooth, grey...white is various degrees of rough) of the surface. The bottom left is the blue channel showing where the bare metal (white) is visible through the various degrees of rust (grey...black). And finally the bottom right is how the final file that is used in the sim looks when those three channels are combined.

The third, purple-ish image is the one that goes into the Normal slot, defining the variation in heights on the surface.

 

[Pyscen]

Hello...

AO or ambient should be white not gray for areas or materials not needed or used. The normal map is separate from the Comp map unless used for ground polys.

 

[Aquilla]

I've attached the O R M I created. This way we can determine or eliminate this as the culprit.
I appreciate all your responses.

Thank you.

 

[ronh]

It sounds like you have it set correctly except for the AO red channel - should be all white or 1 or 255 depending on you texture editor. A gray will make it have a shadow everywhere. meaning it will be as if it's covered.

Do you have an example blend file -

If you have issues then post on my git site. so I can resond there.

 

[ronh]

You are mis interpreting Roughness - a white is roughness and a zero is smooth.

This statement is incorrect
"the green channel on the top right showing the variation in roughness (white is shiny, grey...black is various degrees of rough) of the surface."

The roughness channel a 1 white is rough and a zero is smooth

This is correct
"The bottom left is the blue channel showing where the bare metal (white) is visible through the various degrees of rust (grey...black)."

white is metallic and black - zero is non metallic or dielectric - like paint or rust.

 

[WildLynxPilot]

Oops, you are right. Corrected. It was correct in my previous post, but my brain made a somersault there...

 

[WildLynxPilot]

I've attached the O R M I created. This way we can determine or eliminate this as the culprit.
I appreciate all your responses.

Thank you.

What parts of this image should be shiny/smooth metal and what parts should be rough/matte paint?

 

[Aquilla]

I've attached an example blend file with the texture maps plus a map showing "What parts of this image should be shiny/smooth metal and what parts should be rough/matte paint?"

Also attached the grey scale channels.

 

[ronh]

A few comments on your comp texture

You want the majority of your texture to be flat paint - so that would be a very roughness (G) and a very low metallic (B) color - in gimp the G and B channels there are both a 0.6.
change to G - 0.9 and B = 0.1

You want the other parts to be metallic - A low G and a high B - you have both a high G and B
change to G = 0.1 and B = 0.9

Also you sample blend file is strange in that the backgroud is using an interior HDRI world texture - why interior , why not the default exterior one. The reflection look bad. Change you world mapping back to default too.

My suggestions

 

[Aquilla]

I applied the comp texture you sent and it still has no effect on the model.

This is the same example file I uploaded.

The model is still all matte.

 

[mamu]

those are supposed to be 1.0

 

[rhumbaflappy]

Your material is not a MSFS material. You've messed with the shading. Also, all textures should be of the same size, and all 32-bit PNG. Yours are mis-sized, and at 24-bit.

 

[rhumbaflappy]

This is what I would first do:
Change the view to perspective, rather than orthographic, in Blender. Then change the material type to Decal, then change it back to Standard. This will reset the MSFS material type, and get rid of any shading manipulation. Then the COMP texture works as expected.