Hey guys,
so I have created some maps in substance Painter and brought to Unity 5
However there is quite a striking difference. All metallic parts are pitch black.
Please disregard blue colour, that’s a known light probes bug in Unity 5 with them being crazy bright
Any advice highly appreciated
Thanks
I’m having a devil of a time with metal as well. Does not matter if I make it in SD or create a new material in Unity, anytime I crank the metal up, it turns black.
What worked for me is to make albedo texture brighter and same story for reflection probes/source
The brighter and more defined they are, the better
But brighter Albedo is a must
I have tried cranking the albedo to pure white, and everything in between. Only way to make it not black for me is to turn the metal down, and then I lose all reflection.
I just imported the Shader Calibration from the unity asset store… Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making
And even their Aluminium and steel are black … there must be something in my setting causing this… but what?
I have been able to get metal working with something to reflect. Theoretically the reflection probe should work for this, but if there isn’t anything in the scene with it, it won’t reflect anything. You can check the lighting settings for the scene. In it you can set what the ambient lighting is. At least for testing, you could make a quick gray cubemap, and set that as the ambient lighting cubemap.
About the albedo color with metalness workflow…if using the metal workflow, those parts of the albedo turn into the metal’s reflective color. With the spec workflow it gets a different texture and you make the albedo black, but with the metalness workflow, the albedo covers both of them by going from albedo to reflective colors dependant on the value in the metalness texture. That may be what is confusing some of you.
Yeah, I have some experience with these problems. See, I had a simple starry skybox, and trying to work with a spaceship I was getting all black. Turns out the stars give no lighting, and there is nothing in the scene getting reflected, so the ship was black, just like what you guys are dealing with. So, I testing different things, and now it is a matter of seeing which way looks the best.
Ok, I am using a night sky… and when I turned the ambient intensity all the way up, sure enough seeing the stars in the metal. Switch to a different skybox, and I see that sky in the metal. The scene I have is a night club with lots of point lights, and spot lights. How Do I get the metal to look like metal in that lighting, rather than trying to reflect the sky? All the metal is inside the club btw.
another point, be sure to bake scene lighting in order to see reflections
and not just bake probe alone, because it will be lost if you run game or reload scene, but bake the whole lighting.
if you need to pronounce reflection further, then just set reflection probe intensity to something crazy like 5 or 10
That way I am sure you will see reflection in metallic parts
Thank you for your help. I hope this is considered an area for improvement then, I don’t like not knowing how it’s going to look until I bake it all. Plus I wanted some interactive lights in the scene, especially on the dance floor.
Pure metallic surfaces don’t have any diffuse albedo, so they appear black when probes capture the scene.
In forstbite engine they choose to use the specular lighting to give more lighting depth during probe capture as black was a bit of a problem.
Well, in all the demo vids they can apply metal materials and see an instance change … misleading if you have a dark skybox. I feel it should pick up on other lighting in scene without having to be baked. I am not designing a game, I am designing previews for people to walk around in. Still a new technology, I’m sure it will improve. Although now I have messed with it all so much… lol. I will have to go back in and try and get all the settings back for the materials
Pure metallic surfaces don’t get lit by lights either in Unity - at least not as we may think they should. They will have specular highlights but they seem to lack the diffuse NDOTL term that we are used to from the past (where PBR was not available). If you look at the albedo output (deferred mode) you’ll notice that metallic surfaces have black Albedo as Charkes pointed out. Anything with this value behaves “strangely” when lit by lights. Our world rarely consists of pure conductors - so we are used to perceive lit surfaces in a very distinctive way.
This can be problematic when you have a lot of metallic surfaces in your environment. So make sure most of your environment is made up of dielectrics (painted metal for instance) so that there is something to be reflected on pure metal surfaces.
You can also try to lower the metallness term of your metal surface to simulate a mix of conductor and dielectric matter (think of dust that settled on the metal).
I’m having this problem as well. It seems to only affect the project I upgraded from Unity4. In a fresh Unity5 Project my metals look fine. In the project I upgraded they look like the picture.
I have same issue. And yes. It’s a project updated from Unity 4.
I met this issue too, but I think I’ve solved the problem. In Unity 5, you should choose the type of your reflection prob to “baked”. 
This is kind of an old thread, but if you are having problems with metal textures in a project you updated from Unity 4 to Unity 5, try copying everything into a new scene. This fixed my metal textures. Beware, it may break everything else!
Just in case that somebody is still struggling with this problem:
You can easy fix the black appearence by setting the metallic value in Substance Painter to 0.8 to 0.95. No way up to 1.0!!!
Here my sword asset after (SP: metal 0.95 and Unity: smoothness 0.9) and before (SP: metal 1.0 and Unity smoothness 1.0)
Just want to say THANK YOU VERY MUCH Feuerputz for posting about this and the solution, have had a headache trying to figure this out!
