Exporting EXR files - Working with Maps from the Painter Application
With both the curtain and floor materials added to our scene, time to move into Substance Painter and take a look at how we might go about outputting some textures for the focus of our shot, which is of course the chair sitting in front of the window. To make a start at getting the various map channels we want out of Painter, the first thing that we are going to do is come to the File menu, and from there use the Export Textures command. Taking a quick look at the options found in the dialogue, working from the top down, we see that we have the ability to set an output path, to set a file type or image format along with its associated bit depth.
We can choose an export preset from the scrollable configuration drop-down. We can choose a padding type and pixel value for the padding size, and we can even decide which of the texture sets available we want to export and at what resolution. The maps should be written to disc. Before we use any of these options though, let's jump into the Configuration tab and take a look at what's going on there. In the Presets list on the left of the UI, you can see that we have a whole bunch of options from which to choose, including Arnold, Corona, Unreal, and V-Ray, to name just a few.
We would, of course, want to choose the standard V-Ray option where we have no multi-tile UV sets or U-dins in our scene. But in this instance, in order to continue using the simpler physical material workflow that we have been using so far in the course, I am simply going to choose the PBR Metal Rough option here. Choosing a preset will, as seen in the central area of the UI, give us material output relevant to that option. So in this instance, we see base color, roughness, normal, height, and so on.
All of which you will recognize as being pluggable into the physical material in 3DS Max. Indeed, the dialogue even tells us where these maps are being pulled from, so whilst most of the maps are coming from the existing document channels, two of these being the Mixed AO and Normal options, are being pulled from the Converted Maps section on the right. Now don't be fooled by the fact that we have a preset selected here, as this doesn't actually set us up for export. This is just a configuration dialogue.
To use the options that we see here, we need to jump back into the Export tab, and first of all select an output folder. So in this instance we're going to use the exercise files, Substance files, and Painter folder. We can select the image format, which in this instance will be floating .EXR files. And then before we actually hit the Export button, we need to make certain that the PBR Metal Rough option is selected in the Config drop-down. With 2K Maps keeping those matched to the materials we have created previously.
All we need do, then, is hit the Export button and once everything is processed, a dialogue should pop up which we'd go ahead and hit the Open Folder button, it shows us that we do indeed have a full set of EXR files for the various channels on our material. With the main exports taken care of, then, before moving on to taking a look at how we would go about applying our EXR files to the chair in Max, I just want to take a look in the next two videos at how we might also go about exporting PSD files from Substance Painter as well.