PBR textures not supported entirely

I made a test , and i have four texture :
- diffuse
- normal map
- roughness
- metallic

With Unity shader i only see :
- albedo (= diffuse )
- metallic
- normal
It is not some roughness slot ? Where must it be on alpha of what texture ?
A button to merge Roughness to the alpha of some other maps would be helpfull.

 

Smoothness goes in the alpha channel of the metallic map. You have to hover over the slot for the tooltip which tells you.

 

Thank you, i seen that in the official documentation.
Some button to merge roughtness map on alpha of the with metalness map should be made, not all painting software export to Unity 5 format and doing it manually each time is not a good and fast workflow.

 

That's where Substances come in handy

 

Substance painter is genius. This is a pitfall of pbr / pbs in general, and not Unity or Unreal or Marmoset or thingy X's fault.

 

It really is. In fact, I'd say anyone doing PBR materials in photoshop is wasting the whole potential and reason for PBR. Paint in a PBR package, because for the first time ever it means what you see is what you get, everywhere.

It's a lot more work than before, and more science than pure art, but the results sing.

 

If i use other painting programs that just generates metal and roughness maps, if i don't want to buy substance how do we make the workflow better ?
Unity should really make a "Merge" button to merge metallic or rought map on alpha of another map. It's a missing feature.
Or we should ask them about bringing some new shader that accepts rought map and metallic maps directly without using the alpha channel.

We are talking about Unity workflow, to make compatible maps in a easy and fast way , not what tool we must buy to make them.

 

You're talking about roughness all the time... please keep in mind that the unity standard shader requires a smoothness map (inverted roughness).

Do you mean a separate slot? That would be a total waste, because the roughness/smoothness is only a greyscale map.
I can understand your trouble, but it's not the problem of unity and it's really easy to do in Photoshop or Gimp.

 

Simple PRB is metalness and roughness/gloss.
Painting programs don't provide directly Unity export, not all, having a merge button to merge some map on some alpha channel is needed if you don't want another shader.
Unreal 4 let you the choice to use full textures , things are simple and clear, if you need to use some alpha you just add some nodes on the shader that will extract the alpha and that's it.
(Some shader editor would be welcome indeed).

 

Well that's just the alpha channel - there are no proprietary unity file formats involved. PSD, TIFF, TGA ... Unity actually supports more bitmap formats than Unreal IIRC.

I bring up Substances as they're handy - simple as. But if you want something closer to UE4 then you can write your own shader variant (or user a shader builder such as Shader Forge).