Substance Bitmap2Material 3 Now Available - PBR for Unity 5

Hello,

Bitmap2Material is an incredibly powerful tool that helps you generate full, seamlessly tiling materials from any bitmap image, right within your favorite DCC tool and game engine. This now includes all PBR (Physically-Based Rendering) channels, based on the most accurate conversion algorithm out there.

Bitmap2Material lets you extract all the possible maps from a single image: now with PBR channels such base color (or albedo), metallic, roughness but also normal, height, specular, curvature, AO etc.

• Easily obtain a metallic map from the image using simple tools, or an input mask. This feature is essential when working in PBR.

• Control and adjust the finest details of your material thanks to the comprehensive set of parameters exposed by B2M. This includes adjusting the generated roughness map, for PBR.

• Bitmap2Material provides the ability to make any material tile. You do not need to care anymore about making your photography tile, B2M takes care of it for you. You can chose between 2 modes of tiling: offset or splat.

http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/bitmap2material

Cheers,

Wes

 

No link?

 

Here is the link that they've send with the newsletter.

http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/bitmap2material

Any info about the upgrade path for the Unity Asset Store?

 

Oh, sorry about that. I updated the post with the link as well.

 

Wes -

The newsletter stated that everyone who purchased after August 25th would be upgraded to B2M 3 for free... does that include those who purchased the Indie Pack? I've been trying to figure out how to access B2M 3 but it's not listed under My Account (still the 2.2.1 version) and when I select the Upgrade option it's wanting me to pay for the upgrade.

Edit: Attached buy screen capture that shows the "Created On" which was my purchase date (9/6/2014)

 

Hi Wes,

there´s one thing I do not understand:
Does B2M generate materials or textures?

Regards,
Carsten

 

Hi Carsten,

It generates textures such as base color, diffuse, metal, rough, glossiness, normal etc. These textures make up the channels that describe a material, but B2M export the materials.

However, if you have the Pro version, you can import the substance material (B2M) directly into Unity where you do get a full material that you can apply on your mesh.

Cheers,

Wes

 

Hi Dustin,
Yes, if you purchased Indie pack after Aug 25th, you will get a free upgrade to B2M3. Please just contact us on our support request form.

http://www.allegorithmic.com/contact

Cheers,

Wes

 

Thanks Wes!

 

Wes, I have a question about workflow using B2M. Specifically about how to generate the various maps, from an existing diffuse map on a texture already uv'd. Who/where would be the best place to ask this?
Thank you,
JC

 

Hi JC,

You can ask them here : )

Cheers,

Wes

 

Awesome.
Let's say I have a textured object, uvs, everything.
How would I go about creating the various maps (AO, normal, height, whatever) in B2M from the original diffuse map. So far, I've only seen B2M used with solid, power of 2 textures like wood, stone etc. How do you handle islands of textured items, in a single texture?

 

Sorry Wes, once again - does B2M export materials or textures?

 

B2M generates textures and/or materials. You can easily give it a try:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5687

 

Right, that lite package includes three substance materials.
But these were made in a separate package (substance designer), right?

These reason why I ask again and again is, with my testings, I was only able to export maps from B2M:



Am I wrong when I say that B2M does not generate any materials/substances but only the maps that may be used by substances (or any other materials)?

 

You can use B2M directly in Unity! There is no need to export anything.

 

I know. Still it´s not clear for me....
(
1. The movie is based on a predefined substance that exposes predefined parameters.
2. This substance is made in substance designer, a separate product.
3. B2M only generates the maps
Please correct me if I´m wrong.
)
After all I simply get confused when you don´t accurately distinguish between "textures" and "materials" (e.g materials cannot be seamless tiling, while textures can).

Anyway - thanks very much for trying to help, it´s definately an amazing product!

 

B2M is nothing else than a special kind of substance. I don't know whether it was made in the substance designer or if you could modify it in there.
It uses the input textures in combination with the parameter value to generate the required output textures. You can also select the shader for the material and in the case that it is a built-in one, the output textures will automatically be assigned correctly in the material.

 

Right, thanks very much!

 

Hi,

Dantus is right. B2M is actually a substance. It was made in Substance Designer. B2M is a tool for generating several maps from a single source image. You feed in a diffuse texture and B2M will generate ao, normal, specular from that source image.

Each texture represents a channel for the shader in Unity such as diffuse, specular, normal. These textures describe the surface attributes, which when combined, will make up the information to describe a material. B2M doesn't output an actual material, but textures (the surface attributes e.g diffuse, specular...).

When you import B2M into Unity, it creates a Unity material with a Unity Shader and applies the textures it generates. So what you get is a unity material with the appropriate textures for the shader channels i.e. a full material.

Cheers,

Wes

 

Just purchased upgrade to version 3, love the new feature set.
Also looking forward to painter v1.0 release.

 

Hi!
I'm testing B2M for Unity with some older non-pbr assets to convert them to the new Unity 5 pb-rendering (using Beta 5 12). They have diffuse, spec (without gloss) and normal maps. I've started with a character, where B2M turned the grey and dull armor in nice and shiny metal! But I have trouble working out non metal assets. Using the B2M_3_Unity Substance there is no option to control the roughness, so non metal parts have a specular output I can't control. Using the B2M_3 Substance there is more control over metallic/roughness values, but it generates roughness and metalic maps I can't use with the Unity Standard shader - and a specular map which has other values then the metallic/roughness maps. Also the B2M_3 Version seems to mess up the diffuse information - it generates a normal map from the diffuse, but the generated diffuse is completly grey.
Could you help me with these issues, please?

 

So, roughness is called smoothness in the Unity Version, my fault! This does work.

But there is another issue with Substances in Unity in general, which I can't solve: Substances are not calculated when I open a scene after a restart of Unity. I have to click on every substance to refresh and display properly!

 

Does B2M Pro work with Unity 5 WebGL?

 

Hi,

The substances should auto-generate the texture. Do the texture maps stay blank "pink" in the view until you click on a substance?

Cheers,

Wes

 

Hi Wes,
yes, I have to click on every substance to refresh after opening a scene. They aren't pink every time, but seem to have random colors.

 

Hi,

I'm sorry for the late response. I didn't get a notification the thread was updated. Are you still experiecing this issue. Would you be able to send me the Unity project file?

Please send to wes.mcdermott@allegorithmic.com

Cheers,
Wes

 

Notification is buggy here.
Is there a B2M-3-Unity-lite-demo available (as there is one for B2M 2.2)?

 

Hey Wes,

in the current Beta 16, this issue is gone and everything looks good now!
Thank you!

 

Awesome! Thanks for reporting.

Cheers,

Wes

 

I will check and see. Is the B2M 2.2. lite on the Unity Asset Store?

 

Yes

 

I checked and we can't offer a trial version anymore as this is a policy of the Unity Asset Store. We do have trials for B2M3 on our site. The lite versions are the trials.
http://www.allegorithmic.com/download

Cheers,

Wes

 

Hi Wes, would bitmap2material 3 be able to convert my diffuse, specular and normal maps from my non pbr materials and make them unity standard pbr materials? Thanks

 

Hi,
Yes, you could use B2M3 as a utility for conversion. You would use the diffuse and normal maps as inputs. However, the "new" specular map will need to be generated from B2M3. However, you use your specular map as input to the metallic. Which is used as a mask to help generated the metal-non metal areas of specular.

If you would like, you can email me the maps and I could create a tutorial on how it works for our youTube channel. Please send to wes.mcdermott@allegorithmic.com.

Cheers,

Wes

 

Thanks. I'll email them over asap

 

Just wanted to check if you sent the maps. I haven't received the email and just want to make sure I didn't miss it.

Cheers,

Wes

 

I'm just going to send them now Wes, The Mrs dragged me (kicking and screaming) Christmas shopping today!

 

Hahah. I know the feeling. Same happens to me : )

Cheers,

Wes

 

I suppose it's to be expected this time of year.

I've sent the email.

 

Did you get my email and files ok Wes?

 

Hi,

Yes, I received the textures. Thanks for sending. I will add this to my tutorial list.

Cheers,

Wes

 

Can B2M generate pbr textures from an input texture at runtime?

Thank you for your time.

 

Hi,

Yes, B2M3 can produce PBR Textures. We have a specific version "B2M3_Unity" that creates the glossiness in the alpha of the specular. The glossiness is what unity calls "Smoothness."

Cheers,

wes

 

Thanks for the response. I should have been more specific with my question. Can I use functions like generating a normal map from a bitmap, or automatically tiling a bitmap at runtime (i.e not in the Unity editor but inside my built game)?

Thanks!

 

Yes, absolutely. Any of the parameters you change in the inspector for B2M are accessible at runtime.

http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ProceduralMaterial.html

substance.SetProceduralFloat("B2M Parameter to change ", lerp);

Cheers,
Wes

 

Hi Wes, any eta for this as I'd like to start converting my materials to PBR. Thanks

 

Hi,

I'm very sorry for this delay. I haven't had time to get started on this yet. I will be working on a new set of tutorials and I have this slated for the new series of tutorials. It will probably be after GDC unfortunately.

Please feel free to email me directly and I can help you with the conversion.

Cheers,

Wes

 

Hi wes,

I would like to ask are they any bug or problematic issue by using B2M3 and unity5 RC3 currently? I dont know the workflow well but my boss says there are some bugs with substance,B2M3 and unity5? we want to use these tools in one of our project since it is a texture heavy project.

 

any news