So since it seems im not the only one experiencing this, it seems for some reason creating PBR static assets seems to make them washed out and not at all like how other PBR apps display it. Anyone have any clue on what is going wrong, or having issues like this too?
I'm also experiencing this, I was sent textures exported from substance painter, and when trying to apply them in BeamNG, they were all washed out. BeamNG: Substance: Another set of Substance Painter textures in BeamNG: Less washed out because I set the base color to RGB 128,128,128, but it's still visually quite wrong.
My first suggestion would be to make sure the basecolor texture is in sRGB color space. Here's a screenshot of the setup we use for exporting directly from Substance Painter:
They are in sRGB, double-checked with exiftool. Neither one of my textures is from substance, but instead Agisoft/RealityCapture. I attached the barrel model if you would like to grab and double check it and its basecolor/albedo
So doing a suggestion from dummiesman I converted my PNG texture to a DDS BC1 sRGB one and that seemed to have solved the problem... but strangely then re-pointing it to the png does not cause it to occur again. Is this something that is supposed to happen?
I believe that's because pointing to a png file, where a .dds exists with the same name, will cause the game to use the dds. This is because internally we use a texture cooker to convert png to dds, and then only ship the dds.
Is the sRGB png not working right also to be expected? seems like it but would be good to know for down the line since I tend to work in PNG for best compatibility with my DCC.
I'm at the end of my knowledge on this topic, but I'll ask our graphics programmer what the reason for this is. DDS should be used for final assets for performance reasons.
You should never use PNGs textures on the materials. Uncompressed formats are x4/x8 times bigger in the GPU compared with DDS/BC. At this point we have no support for sRGB PNGs, the render assume they are linear and apply a gamma 2.2 curve. Plz use the texture cooker we provide, will offer you a simple interface to use the best formats for any use case. There are a lack of free o open source tools with support for full specs of DDS, we had this problem internally on the past.
Good to know! I use maya and substance as my main tools, and I know maya can be very iffy with how it handles DDS so thats why I stuck with PNG for so long. Most of my stuff was personal fun anyways, the few projects that I did make public were DDS for sure.