MSFS20 Need Help in Composite for Custom Material

[delta_foxtrot]

Hi all. Apologies for being a noob. I was wondering what was this mean in documentation regarding the Composite in Custom Material:

• Normal Roughness Metal: Normal in GA (as XZ packed), B: roughness, R: metalness. Please note that the metalness in not apply on the ground.

As I understand it, Roughness is in Blue Channel, Metalness is in Red Channel. However, I did not understand what does Normal in GA (as XZ packed) means. What channel should the normal be? I use photoshop to do the compositing. Thanks in advanced!

 

[TheJon182]

Where is that information? i didn't saw it on the sdk doc, is there any update?

 

[toprob]

If you look at a normal map in Photoshop, you'll see that only two channels are used, and they each contain very different data. (From memory red is X, and green is Z.) So what currently goes in the Red channel now goes in Green, and the Green channel goes into the Alpha. Or the other way around, I'm working from memory here....

 

[YohanNaz]

If you look at a normal map in Photoshop, you'll see that only two channels are used, and they each contain very different data. (From memory red is X, and green is Z.) So what currently goes in the Red channel now goes in Green, and the Green channel goes into the Alpha. Or the other way around, I'm working from memory here....

I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure a normal map has X, Y, and Z which are in the RGB channels. MSFS uses DirecX style Normals which has "Y" flipped versus OpenGL style. Some maps MSFS uses only use specific Normal channels depending on the use but a standard Normal map that would be applied to a 3D model has three channels. If I'm wrong someone please correct me.

From Google: "Usually the red channel of a tangent-space normal map stores the X axis (pointing the normals predominantly leftwards or rightwards), the green channel stores the Y axis (pointing the normals predominantly upwards or downwards), and the blue channel stores the Z axis (pointing the normals outwards away from the surface"

 

[toprob]

Sorry, yeah, I did simplify that a lot. Since these are always stuck on the ground, only two of the three channels are required.

 

[delta_foxtrot]

Where is that information? i didn't saw it on the sdk doc, is there any update?

It's in the SDK documentation. Under Material Editor section.

 

[YohanNaz]

Hi all. Apologies for being a noob. I was wondering what was this mean in documentation regarding the Composite in Custom Material:

• Normal Roughness Metal: Normal in GA (as XZ packed), B: roughness, R: metalness. Please note that the metalness in not apply on the ground.

As I understand it, Roughness is in Blue Channel, Metalness is in Red Channel. However, I did not understand what does Normal in GA (as XZ packed) means. What channel should the normal be? I use photoshop to do the compositing. Thanks in advanced!

Hey delta_foxtrot, I believe they're referring to packing the texture map channel Green with Normal Red(X) and Alpha with Normal Blue(Z). The final texture would be R:Metalness G:Norm(X) or Red B:Roughness A:Norm(Z) or Blue. Hope that helps.

 

[delta_foxtrot]

Hey delta_foxtrot, I believe they're referring to packing the texture map channel Green with Normal Red(X) and Alpha with Normal Blue(Z). The final texture would be R:Metalness G:Norm(X) or Red B:Roughness A:Norm(Z) or Blue. Hope that helps.

Thank you very much! I will try this out and will get back here for the result! Really appreciate the help!

 

[Ahunterg95]

I have been trying to get my head around this in Photoshop as well! I'm curious if you made much progress? I have been trying to organise it into an action to speed up the process, however, I'm not convinced that I have my folders and channels correctly working...

 

[=rk=]

PBR textures are divided into albedo (day), emissive (night), metallic (COMP) and normal (N) textures.
The COMP texture has the A/O, roughness and metallic values packed into the color channels in black/white mapping, such that white is full or numeric value 1 and black is null or numeric value 0.

• Red = Anisotropic Occlusion​
• Green = Roughness​
• Blue = Metal​

 

[DanielM]

I have been trying to get my head around this in Photoshop as well! I'm curious if you made much progress? I have been trying to organise it into an action to speed up the process, however, I'm not convinced that I have my folders and channels correctly working...

I would not bother using Photoshop for this as it involve to much manual work. The quickest method is to install ImageMagick and then use the Convert to with the -combine command to merge three files in to one.

You basically put your three PBR channel files in a folder, right click the folder and select to open it in the terminal or PowerShell.
Then you type: convert .\your_ao.png .\your_roughness.png .\your_metallic.png -combine your_pbr_output_file.png
Then press enter. When you do that a new file will show up in the folder. This is your PBR file where your ao, roughness and metallic files are put to the RBG channels.

You will most likely end up in situations where you need to edit the PBR as some of the channels may be to strong (usually) or to weak. Rebuilding the file in PS over and over would take a lot of time. Using ImageMagick just require you to run the same command a second time.

 

[Ahunterg95]

@=rk= @DanielM

Thankyou both for your reply! I believe that I have the RGB COMP textures for 3D models sorted.
It's the RGB Alpha that I'm having some trouble with for creating custom ground textures for aprons, grass, gravel, dirt... Stuff like that.

It's something I have wanted to be able to do for months now and have tried, but have really been struggling... I feel like I'm close with Photoshop but just missing the mark...