Surforge 1.4.5 - 3D rendered PBR texturing in Unity

Source code is paramount if support is stressed and you are making a commercial product, you don't want to be screwed when urgency happen.

 

1.06 just released on the asset store.
Will take a look the next days. Thanks a lot for the new release with source code!!!

 

It is a copy of the file to keep re-open will report the error is equivalent to this file is broken. The new will not. With the win7 system, unity5.6.1fi, Surforge1.0.5

 

Thank you.

Surforge 1.0.6 released.
- Unity 2017 compatibility.
- Source codes.

Please check source codes release note.
Briefly, please keep your 1.0.5 installation for ability to edit your old scenes.

 

Sergeyv_3d, firstly I'd like to say thank you so much for making 3d model texturing accessible to us non-artists. I've been loving Surforge.

I've been having an issue, though. Using a darker material (like one of the steel textures), creating panels using the lasso tool seems to introduce a rusty/reddish tinge around the edges, like this:
Is there any way to remove the red colour from this, so it simply becomes a darker grey? I've tried changing all of the settings in the material and can't find anything that changes it.

Thanks!

 

Thank you very much for your feedback. I am happy you like Surforge

This color you get could be from the feature called "dirt" or from "worn edges".
You could easily tweak color, size, noise or completely remove dirt from your Material Set, selecting the "Dirt" settings in Material Set dropdown menu.


You could tweak worn edges feature for each material in the set.
There is also "underlying" properties group, which specify the surface seen through worn edges.

 

Sergeyv_3d, going to the "Dirt" material and reducing both amounts fixes it completely. Thanks for the fast support!

 

Can increase the number of id?

 

In current version there are maximum of 8 materials in one material set.
Surforge is GPU based, that makes possible to tweak materials in real time. But, being GPU based, it has some limitations.

The 8 material IDs is optimal balance between functionality and performance.
Adding more IDs will also require extra texture samplers to store it masks, which is hardware limited.

Material IDs number can be extended in future versions, if it really needed.

In practice 8 IDs is really enough for almost everything. Please don't forget about extra labels layer with independent colors, and two emission masks. Usually you will find that you use not all of them.

In rare cases when you need more materials you could use this trick:
Surforge allows you to work with any number of Material Sets at once in one scene, changing it in real time with Material Set dropdown menu under texture preview.
You could create more variants of your texture, with extra materials. Then enable "export masks: separate" in render tab to export your ID masks.
You could then combine your exported texture designs in image editor based on that masks.

 

Hope to have an extended

 

I know that the source code is released but any news on scene not saving textures with it so its size is not like 30mb each?

 

This will be improved in next update.

For now i could offer you a quick solution.

Spoiler: Just add this couple lines of code:

Add this to Surforge\Editor\Surforge.cs 4055, at the end of "static void CreateTextures(int res)"

Code (CSharp):

1. //Do not save textures with the scene
2. if (surforgeSettings.normalMap != null)  surforgeSettings.normalMap.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
3. if (surforgeSettings.emissionMap != null)  surforgeSettings.emissionMap.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
4. if (surforgeSettings.objectMasks != null)  surforgeSettings.objectMasks.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
5. if (surforgeSettings.objectMasks2 != null)  surforgeSettings.objectMasks2.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
6. if (surforgeSettings.aoEdgesDirtDepth != null)  surforgeSettings.aoEdgesDirtDepth.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
7. if (surforgeSettings.labelsMap != null)  surforgeSettings.labelsMap.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
8. if (surforgeSettings.labelsAlpha != null)  surforgeSettings.labelsAlpha.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
9. if (surforgeSettings.renderTexture != null)  surforgeSettings.renderTexture.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
10. if (surforgeSettings.renderTexture2 != null)  surforgeSettings.renderTexture2.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;
11. if (surforgeSettings.bucketTexture != null)  surforgeSettings.bucketTexture.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;

Add this to Surforge\Editor\Interface\SurforgeInterface.cs 667, after "Surforge.surforgeSettings.materialButtons[materialButtonIndex].Apply();"

Code (CSharp):

1. //Do not save material icons with the scene
2. Surforge.surforgeSettings.materialButtons[materialButtonIndex].hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSaveInEditor;

To make flags apply for your existing scenes:
- hit render to update textures.
- change skybox and select "materials tab" to update material icons.

Then save your scene.
This will reduce the size of the scenes to about 1 mb

After loading a scene, you have to hit "render" to see your material, and change skybox to force material icons update.

 

How i can create the new material ?

 

Thank you very much for your purchase.

To create new material, please:
1. Drag-and-drop the material you like to the texture preview from materials tab.
2. Select it with hovering the mouse pointer over it on the texture preview and press Ctrl key.
3. Edit it as needed, and save with "save current material" button:

Press "Reload" button on top of materials list in Surforge material tab, to update your materials list.

You could edit your new material asset in the project any time with Unity Inspector. You need to click "reload" button if you edited, renamed, duplicated or deleted your custom materials in your project.

You could also check this video about materials and material sets in Surforge.

 

Yea I did it
Very nice support ! Thank you !

I just review " 5 Star " In your asset

But i think you need make a Good layout Editor for the material because have so much material .... i need something big layout
Ex :
when click to material tab it will show a new window and have other tab material in there like : Wood - Stone- Rock - metal ...... and Please make a button " create new material " Because you use the shader Hidden/Surforge And i can't select this shader .... if i use "unity standard " it will not show in materials list

This asset very cool but it a bit hard to use ... Assign material make me some time confusion because the color masks very hard to distinguish

So ... I hope you will update more in the future !

 

Is there any documentation on transparency?

 

Thank you very much for your feedback and high rate.
I will try to improve the points you mentioned.

I am sorry, transparency feature is not yet documented.
There is a little group of transparency controls for each material, located at the very bottom.

"Global transparency" makes material fully transparent. It affects both albedo and specular at the same time.
"Albedo transparency" affects only albedo, without specular. You could use it to make glass materials.
"Paint 1 and 2 transparency" makes material transparent, using the texture in paint slot as a mask. You could use it for making semi transparent materials.

When you press export, transparency is stored on albedo texture alpha channel.
To enable it, please change "rendering mode" of your Standard material to "transparent" in Unity Inspector tab.

 

Does anyone encounter these errors when building for Android?

Code (CSharp):

1. Assets/Surforge/GPURender/GPURender.cs(2,7): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `UnityEditor' could not be found. Are you missing an assembly reference?
2.  
3. Assets/Surforge/GPURender/SurforgeComposerShaderGUI.cs(83,2): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `MaterialProperty' could not be found. Are you missing an assembly reference?
4.  
5.  

I'm using Unity 5.6.3p1 (64-bit), Surforge 1.0.6.

 

Could you please try using platform dependent compilation, like described here?
This could possibly be solved by by putting #if UNITY_EDITOR before the using UnityEditor directive and #endif after it.
I will try to add this in next update.

It is better not to import Surforge into your working project.
You could have the separate project with Surforge, as a "texture factory" for your main project.

 

Thanks for your suggestion. It is better to separate Surforge to another project of which only 1 purpose is to produce texture. How is shader implemented if it is in another project?

 

Surforge shader is used only for tweaking your materials, and previewing results while working on your texture.
When you press export, all material IDs combined, and all settings applied.

The exported result is a set of textures for using with built-in Unity Standard (specular setup) shader. You could use exported textures with your own shaders as well.

Just copy your models to Surforge project, texture them, and copy exported maps to your main project to keep things clean.

Of course you could install Surforge to your working project, if it really needed. In most cases it works, but sometimes something could interfere, depends on project settings. Surforge was designed to be a kind of "stand alone" tool.

I am trying to gradually remove all possible conflicts based on users feedback. But Surforge is tightly connected with project settings, due to the way Unity Editor works. The default new project suits best for it.

 

I am using surforge as sergey suggested, and it is much better in my opinion.

 

Getting errors on a fresh project with just Surforge and Standard Assets.

"Assets/Standard Assets/Effects/ImageEffects/Scripts/ScreenSpaceAmbientObscurance.cs(189,3): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `SSAOSettings' could not be found. Are you missing an assembly reference?"


Using Unity 5.6.0f3.

 

Hi there, Surforge looks great and I'm thinking about buying it, but it looks like it depends on the numpad keys in some ways. Is it possible to make it also work without numpad, like maybe using cursor-keys with alt modifier key or maybe a group of 9 letter keys with a modifier key or something?

 

Confirmed the conflict between Surforge 1.0.6 and Legacy Image Effects.
This will be fixed in upcoming update. Thank you very much for finding this!

I am sorry for the inconvenience. You could use this workaround for now:

Spoiler

1. Create new project and import Surforge. Do not import Legacy Image Effects (Standart Assets) yet.
2. Rename "\Assets\Surforge\GPURender\SSAOSettings.cs" to "SurforgeSSAOSettings.cs"
3. In "\Assets\Surforge\GPURender\SurforgeSSAOSettings.cs" rename "SSAOSettings" to "SurforgeSSAOSettings" and save.
4. In "\Assets\Surforge\GPURender\GPURender.cs" rename all "SSAOSettings" to "SurforgeSSAOSettings" and save.
5. in "\Assets\Surforge\SSAObscurance\SurforgeSSAO.cs" rename all "SSAOSettings" to "SurforgeSSAOSettings" and save.
6. File - Save Project.
7. You could import Legacy Image Effects package now.

I am sorry for hotkey customize feature so long delayed.
It was shifted by more urgent things. I will add this as soon as possible.

You could use this workaround for now:
Edit "\Assets\Surforge\Editor\Interface\SurforgeInterface.cs",
search for "KeyCode.Keypad" entries, and replace for some other keycodes.
Please check "\Assets\Surforge\SurforgeHotkeys.pdf" for new custom hotkeys are not already assigned.

 

That's cool, actually I've just bought it anyway, nice plugin!

There's a little bug with the control key in the materials tool, it doesn't seem to select the material under the mouse pointer. I'm running Unity 2017.1 on a mac if that helps. I tried debugging it a bit, and looks like the control key messages never arrive, not sure why though.

Also, would it be possible to have 512x512 texture res mode for very fast previews? I'm running on a laptop and it's a bit slow at 1024x1024. I've hacked it temporarily to do this, but might be nice in the proper version too.

And one more thing, can there be a mode to make seamless preview show the open model instead of the planes? I know the open model might not always have all seamless UVs, but still it can be nice to see the texture wrap around actual geometry a bit, and it can help to check the symmetry of a texture to see it wrapped over a cube for example.

Cheers

 

Thank you very much for your purchase.

Couldn't you please check, if "ctrl select the material under the mouse pointer" works for you, if Surforge window has focus, for example after rotating texture preview a bit or clicking somewhere?
It seems when just hover the mouse over the Surforge window after doing Unity Scene View navigation is not enough to Surforge window has focus. I am searching how to fix it.

The 512x512 texture resolution mode is planned.
You could also have your Texture Preview navigation to run faster, by changing Texture Preview rendertexture resolution.
To do this, select "texturePreview" game object in Hierarchy tab on the scene where Surforge is running, double click on the "Preview Render Texture" field content of Surforge Texture Preview script in Unity Inspector tab, and change its size to 512x512

The seamless preview mode shows the planes only with default preview cube.
It should show your custom model in Texture Preview in both seamless and regular modes, when you selected custom model in the "open model" field in Surforge render tab.

 

I checked again with a fresh import of Surforge and a new scene with a new texture, and the control key still doesn't seem to work for me even after clicking and working everywhere in the Surforge window panels. Strangely after some short time (about when the tooltip pops up) if I hit control, it seems to highlight some shape over in the scene view while control is held down. But even if I make sure to quickly hit control before that happens, it still doesn't select the material.

That's interesting that you can change the preview resolution like that, it could speed up preview rotation etc. which is good, but I'm not sure it makes any difference to the actual texture rendering, i.e. when hitting the space-bar. It will be nice when there is a 512x512 option as you say.

You're right, the seamless mode preview does now seem to show the opened model, it was just last night that I couldn't get it to do that. It would work for a short time and then revert the model back to the planes. These things happen I guess.

 

Thank you very much, i will check it carefully.
You could also use the dropdown menu for selecting materials.

 

Yes, that's what I have to do right now, but I can't remember which materials belong to which parts of the design, and there's no preview thumbnail to show what the current material looks like once it's selected, so it's basically guessing.

I have another question, is it possible to decrease the intensity of the ambient occlusion? It's extremely strong, and I can't find where to turn down its opacity. Also can its radius and/or sharpness be controlled too?

P.S. I think I worked out what I did wrong with the seamless preview mesh, for some silly reason I was using one of the other preview meshes (soft cube?) as the loaded model, instead of my own mesh as I should have.

 

There is a shader "combinePost.shader" in the "\Assets\Surforge\GPURender\" folder.
You could edit it to change AO captured by Surforge.
The resultColor.r is a channel where AO stored.
Try changing the string
resultColor.r = resultColor.r * modelBakedAO.r;
for example to
resultColor.r = resultColor.r * modelBakedAO.r + 0.05;

Please also check the Dirt Amount value of your material set in the "Dirt" group of controls in material selection dropdown menu.
It may be that it is not the AO, but dirt settings of material set is too intensitive.

 

Thanks for being so responsive and helpful with your answers!

I checked again and it was the AO in this case, it seems to get really heavy around the little pipes greebles sometimes. I experimented a bit with that shader code and it helps a lot. Here's a variant that seems to offer good control:

const float intensityAO = 0.7f;
const float limitAO = 0.5f;
resultColor.r = max(1.0f-limitAO*intensityAO, (1.0f-intensityAO) + intensityAO * (resultColor.r * modelBakedAO.r));

If something like that intensity value and limit value could be controlled from the editor and saved with the texture, maybe in the global materials adjustments area, that would be great, or at least I think so.

Here is an example of before and after images of what the above adjustment does with just those values shown.

Before adjustment:


After adjustment:

 

Thank you very much for your suggestions. AO controls is useful feature.

I see now what kind of AO intensity problems you meant.
This pipes set is from the early beta, when the Greebles Tool step was twice larger.
Its details are too small and too elevated above the surface. I will fix this detail set in the future.
The default AO settings should work well with other greebles and detail sets.

 

Congrats on a phenomenal resource -- I've been messing with Surforge for several days, and I know I'm still just scratching the surface (the "shatter" feature, for instance, is incredibly useful for natural-looking surfaces). The tool reminds me a little bit of Terrain Composer -- in a good way, I mean -- with regard to how there's SO much functionality that I've really needed to dedicate some time to it in order to take advantage of more than a fraction of its capabilities.

That being said, there are a few annoying quirks here and there, especially in the texture-preview window. One trouble I have is that the view automatically resets whenever I click with my left button -- NOT a double-click; it happens when I single-click too!

That's a pain, but I'm sure it'll be fixed eventually. A bigger problem has been the way that the "Texture Preview" keymap/tips list is ALWAYS popping up -- and it pretty much covers the center of my Texture Preview window. Perhaps there's a workaround or a "User Preferences" setting, but I haven't been able to find one.

Until I do, I came up with a simple workaround that other folks might find useful as well. The "SurforgeInterface.cs" script includes a section that lists the contents of the "Texture Preview" list. All the lines are double-spaced (\n\n), so i just single-spaced them instead. The list is much more compact, and frees up the center of my Texture Preview window, like this.



Just a tip, in case anyone else has had the same problem!

 

Yes, I just started to try to use Surforge yesterday and was dealing with the same problems. I figured I must have something configured wrong, and was about to give up on it.

 

Thank you very much for using Surforge and for your feedback.

I am sorry for the inconvenience. The issue with improper doubleclick is fixed, it will be the part the next update.
I hope that the update will be ready by the end of this week.

The update is really huge. It is aimed on Surforge material system improvements, and also includes a lot of fixes.

I'm aware of problems with pop-ups.
At the moment they are implemented through the built-in Unity Editor pop-ups, which are not designed for a lot of information.

Please treat with understanding, that it takes a lot of time to implement your own pop-up system.
I'm looking for a suitable solution for the pop-ups issue.

 

Thanks for the info, Sergey!

Regarding the pop-up system, I think your implementation is generally quite good. The only problem occurs when there are super-long lists. I don't know if it's worth implementing an entirely new pop-up system for that relatively minor problem (it's tolerable, now that I've single-spaced the list).

A couple of other/easier ways to address the oversized pop-up windows might be:
1) Use a longer pop-up delay for the big lists, so that folks only see it when they need to.
2) Add a toggle for "detailed help" which would allow folks to turn those lists off if they don't need them.
3) Put the key-lists on a separate PDF file that can be easily viewed in a separate window/app.
4) Allow more flexibility with the Surforge window-set, so users can arrange the Surforge window layout vertically or horizontally, rather than forcing the material-settings to be either at the right side (in a wider window) or the bottom (in a smaller window). This would be especially helpful for folks like me who have multiple monitor screens with different aspect ratios.
*****4B) If you're hesitant to allow window-rearrangement because of potential confusion with new users, perhaps consider including a toggle to allow rearrangement once users understand the basic system.

Thanks again!

 

Thank you very much for your suggestions.
I single spaced the texture preview tooltip.
By the way, there is a compact hotkeys list in \Assets\Surforge\SurforgeHotkeys.pdf

 

Just one of many new features of upcoming update: maps preview and calibration charts.

The good news is that update is send for approvement already!

 

Good

 

Great news! 1.0.7 is here. Huge update!

Surforge material system greatly improved.

Added Curstom Specular/Glossiness, AO, Emission maps slots for Surforge materials.
Drag-and-drop Surforge materials and material sets from project to texture preview.
Unity Standard (specular setup) materials import on drag-and-drop to Surforge texture preview.
Improved quality of existing materials, added normal maps for all Surforge textures.
24 new materials.

Preview material maps with right click menu on texture preview.
Albedo, specular, glossiness calibration charts in maps preview.
Much reduced the size of the saved scenes. Textures and material icons no more saved with the scene.

fixed: Build project with Surforge caused errors.
fixed: Texture preview doubleclick issue.
fixed: Lagacy Image Effects package conflict.
fixed: Select materials with Ctrl over texture preview when Surforge window not focused.
fixed: After seamless mode used, reset texture preview camera could have wrong distance.
fixed: After skybox rotation, reset texture preview could be wrong centered.
fixed: Drag started outside of texture preview could sometimes rotate viewport.
fixed: Material icons paint noise was not visible.
fixed: Deleting objects in seamless mode could sometimes lead to error.

 

Hello,

Today I started to try your app because it looks impressive

By the way I've come across a problem at beginning. I've kept trying to dragging a game object with a mesh filter component to [Open Model] space in Surforge window but it doesn't work. (See Below).



Do you know why this happens and how can it be solved?

 

Hey @tripolygon_geometry,

the "Open model" field needs a mesh and not a game object. Try drag&drop your um_37572 mesh object to the field.
If you'r using ProBuilder, here is a tutorial with an example:

 

Please drag not the game object, but mesh filter component. This should work.
That is becouse, like TS42 sayed, the "Open model" field needs a mesh and not a game object.

 

Will there a be a video tutorial going over these new items?

 

The mesh should have been exported to .asset file.

Dragging an item of mesh filter component doesn't work either because the mesh file probably doesn't exit so I had to export the mesh to .asset file.

See below.

 

Yes, just give me a little time to create a video.

 

He is the asset maker

 

I really can't wait to use this new version of uModeler with Surforge.