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 .

Lumberyard
C++

The sources for this project are available on github.

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…