Table of Contents
SubstanceNG Gem
Project description
- SubstanceNG is a re-implementation og the Substance Gem provided by default for Lumberyard.
- I initiated this project when we realized while working on Lumberyard game that the default Substance Gem had serious limitations: mainly, it seemed to be used an old version of the substance engine, and thus, could not be used to load substance archives generated from Substance Designer 6 for instance (some simple substances could still work, but not the one using the new substance engine 6 features (?)).
- So I started with some investigation on the available Susbtance plugins for the major engines, and in this process, found the Susbtance plugin for Unreal Engine 4. I downloaded this plugin, and analyzed the sources which were using a completely different API to access the substance engine. Turned out this version was using the substance engine 6.
- Thus I started with a copy of the Substance Gem sources, and updated them progressively to incorporate this latest version of the Substance engine, and get ride of the all version in parallel.
- The new substance gem also come with some minor improvements:
- Support for emissive outputs from substance archives.
- Support for Lumberyard material reloading when input parameters are changed and saved on a given substance.
- Yet, for the moment, many of the flow graph nodes available in the legacy Substance Gem are not available yet in this Susbtance NG gem. To be added later
.
Skills & Techs
- Lumberyard
- C++
Sources
- The sources for this project are available on github.
Images
Implementation notes
- Generating gem uuid from: https://guidgenerator.com/online-guid-generator.aspx
- It seems the gem is not rebuild when changed, need to call instead:
lmbr_waf build_win_x64_vs2015_profile -p gems
- Could successfully change the plugin window name to “Substance NG Editor”
- Also, note that the Substance Editor menu tool bar button is not working with this new plugin.
- Need to figure out how to link to an external library when building a gem: OK updated our gem wscript file with:
libpath = [bld.Path('Gems/SubstanceNG/Code/Libs/Win64')], lib = ['pfxlinkercommon','algcompression','tinyxml','substance_linker_static', 'substance_sse2_blend_static','substance_framework'], # could also add: 'substance_d3d11pc_blend_static' as engine ? - Checking if package can be created: OK (got invalid package as expected!)
- Now trying to pass real data for package creation: OK
- We should use SystemFile to read the content of a file.
- We needto provide a full path for our file to be able to find/open it.
- Now reading the content of the sbsar:
- Retrieving graphs: OK
- Retrieving the outputs: OK
- Write the smtl file:
- Got an error when updating the EBus interface for virtual bool CreateProceduralMaterial(const char* basePath, const char* sbsarPath, const char* smtlPath) = 0; ⇒ It seems we still reference the Subtance includes: OK fixed.
- Now we are at the next error: Failed to create substance material, and with that we have the error message: ProceduralMaterial: Error loading substance (materials/substances/lava.sbsar) for material (materials/substances/lava.smtl)
- So, the next step is the call to GetMaterialFromPath: note that this method should return NULL if the material file doesn't exist yet.
- ERROR: We have the problem that the gem is trying to retrieve the Input at index 0 whereas we declared 0 inputs: fixed (⇒ stupid error)
- Need to fill a STextureLoadData for our substance texture files: OK
- We still have a problem with the error message: [Error] Unsupported substance pixel format: 28 28 in binary is: 00011100
- 00 (from right side) ⇒ RAW compression
- 11 ⇒ Substance_PF_RGBx|Substance_PF_RGB
- 1 ⇒ 16b channels
- OK: we now have support for proper import of sbsar files.
- Add support for emissive texture in materials: OK
- Not sure how to have Lumberyard find the emittance texture…
- Where on earth do we specify that *.smtl files should be read as substance materials ?!
- Could be this is not directly referenced: instead, the reference is done with the .mtl file created in the process (?)
- Found that the .mtl file is create from QProceduralMaterialEditorMainWindow::CreateMaterial()
- Checking if we can add support for emissive texture there: OK
- Note: maybe ambient occlusion can be activated with the EFTT_OCCLUSION slot ?
- Write the texture files when saving material with new name: OK
- Avoid duplicating material when saving procedural mat:
- ERROR: Could not link CMaterial::Reload() function…
- When writing susbtance smtl files we should also write the input values: OK
- Question on project licensing asked to amazon: https://gamedev.amazon.com/forums/questions/18854/new-substance-ng-gem.html
TODOs
- Clean the Gem removing all references on the previous version of the Substance API
- Add supprot for channel orders