Hello, fellow Blender artists! I hate asking for help with my first post, but I think I’m going to finally throw in the towel and ask for some input.
First a bit about me, and why I’m trying to get the two programs to play nice. I have been using blender extensively for the last year. I was brought into contact with it due to wanting to create 3d assets for the game Second Life. Since then I’ve expanded my horizons onto other engines like UE4 and CryEngine. This is all good and fair, but a issue arises when I try to port my PBR assets that I have textured in the Quixel Suite, into Second Life.
Now a bit about Second Life’s rendering engine. Second Life uses a rather antiquated hodge-podge of technologies that allow it to only support Diffuse, Specular, and Normal maps currently. This facilitates in the need to bake some global illumination information onto the diffuse map. Yes, the lighting is not completely accurate, but it’s needed due to the primitive rendering engine. This is where Blender’s Cycles “combined bake” comes in.
I have been trying to create a workflow from the Quixel Suite into Blender’s Cycles so I can bake down my PBR materials into the Diffuse texture. I have been experimenting quite extensively trying to get my PBR textures, in this case Albedo, Gloss, Specular, and, Normal maps to display properly. Now I realize that Cycles is not a conventional PBR render engine, say like Marmoset, but I was hoping there was a way to get near PBR results using nodes. Would the genius material gurus here be willing to give me a helping hand? There may be some free pizzas involved if someone gets this working, and of course a lot of good karma.
I have attached some a few screenies and attempts with some brief descriptions.
First, the how it should look. This was rendered in realtime in Quixel Suite’s 3Do renderer.
Second, how it looks with Blender’s Cycles.
I think it looks decent, but it is nowhere near as accurate as id like.
Third, my node setup. I used in the above renderer. I based some of this off of a node setup that came from blendertuts, over on the poylcount forums. It has two gloss channels, so I can slide between flat and more reflective like a mirror. Its buggy and definitely has issues.
A big thank you ahead of time, and I hope hear from you guys.