Creating Variation in SBSAR Materials without creating a mess?

Rendering
1

I love using SBSAR materials, but one catch I’ve found is that the material files can be VERY large, on the order of 100’s of megs, and so file size can blow up mighty quick. The issue gets even worse when you need to create subtle variations in order to keep things from getting that identical/repeating look. For instance, fencing:

image
image1920×949 158 KB

To make it look good, I’ve had to create multiple copies of the same material, and then tweak the seed or some values, just to get a subtle variation. Each one is another copy of the material, and the file size blows up. For instance, here’s a basic conceptual model that is all of 3 megs of actual NURBS geometry, but the file size is now nearly a gig on account of materials:

image
image1920×1135 195 KB

Has anyone come up with some elegant work arounds for issues like this?

-Sky

2

Are you making the materials in substance, or are you simply grabbing them from the substance library?

you can take the substance material, then convert it to a physically based material (just change the dropdown type) then save it to file. Then reimport it as a pbr… the size of each material will drop a lot.

1 Like
3

I’m grabbing them from the Substance library, and then duplicating them inside Rhino. I’ll give that a shot!

4

I’ve found success using the custom mapping feature in rhino to just apply a variated texture all at once in Substance Painter and then import the UVs and texture back in after