SX Tools 2 for Blender

NOTE: Please visit the Documentation Site

Comparison

SX Tools	SX Tools 2
Static layer stack	Fully dynamic layerstack
CPU viewport compositing	GPU compositing
Vertex color exporting	Vertex color and palette texture atlas exporting
Transparency only as an export category	Transparency as a per-object viewport feature

For Game Developers

SX Tools 2 is a lightweight content pipeline for vertex-colored assets that drive PBR (Physically Based Rendering) materials in a game. This tool ships with baseline shader networks for Unreal and Unity.

For 3D Artists

SX Tools is a multi-layer vertex coloring toolbox, referencing a workflow from common 2D image editing programs.

Highlights

Game artists can now work with vertex colors as layers with opacities and blend modes. Regular paint operations like gradients, color fills and even occlusion baking can be performed directly to vertex color layers. SX Tools 2 comes with a dynamic custom material that displays all edits in the viewport in realtime.

The artist can therefore apply per-vertex occlusion/metallic/smoothness/transmission/emission directly on the model, and tweak the results interactively.

Features

Multi-layer vertex color editing
Layer blend modes (alpha, additive, multiply, overlay)
Color filler with optional noise
Color gradient tool with optional noise
Curvature-based shading
Vertex ambient occlusion baking
Mesh thickness baking
Luminance-based tone-mapping
Master Palette Tool for quickly replacing the color scheme of object/objects
PBR Material Library
Quick-crease tools
Modifier automations
Material channel editing (subsurface scattering, occlusion, metallic, roughness)
FBX-exporting multi-layer vertex-colors to game engines via UV channels to drive the standard PBR material

Installation:

Download the zip file, uncompress it, then install and enable sxtools2.py through the Blender add-on interface
Point the library folder in SX Tools 2 prefs to the unzipped folder
Pick your asset library .json file if you also use SX Batcher
SX Tools 2 will appear as a tab in the top right corner of the 3D view

Getting Started:

Now would be a good time to visit the Documentation Site

Exporting to Game Engines

The basic flow for using SX Tools in game development is as follows:

Model your assets as low-poly control cages for subdivision
Define the categories needed for your objects in your game
Assign objects to categories
Color the objects according to category-specific layer definitions
Batch-process the objects for export, leave as much work for automation as possible. Take a look at the existing batch functions and adapt to your project needs.
Export to your game engine as FBX
Run the assets using a the provided custom material (or make your own)

The package contains simple example shader graphs for Unreal4, and both HDRP and URP renderers in Unity. Dynamic palette changes in the game engine are not facilitated by the example shader graphs, but they do fully support driving PBR material channels with UV data.

Currently the export channels are set in the following way:

Channel	Function
UV0	Reserved for a regular texturing
UV1	Reserved for lightmaps
U2	Layer coverage masks for dynamic palettes
V2	Ambient Occlusion
U3	Transmission or SSS
V3	Emission
U4	Metallic
V4	Smoothness
U5	Alpha Overlay 1, an alpha mask channel
V5	Alpha Overlay 2, an alpha mask channel
UV6/UV7	RGBA Overlay, an optional additional color layer

Vertex colors are exported from the Composite/VertexColor0 layer. Material properties are assigned according to the list above. Note that emission is exported only as an 8-bit mask for base vertex color, not a full RGBA-channel.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to:

Rory Driscoll for tips on better sampling

Serge Scherbakov for tips on working with iterators

Jason Summers for sRGB conversion formulas

SX Tools 2 builds on the following work:

Vertex-to-edge curvature calculation method

Algorithm by Stepan Jirka

http://www.stepanjirka.com/maya-api-curvature-shader/

Integrated into SX Tools 2 under MIT license with permission from the author.

V-HACD For Blender 2.80

Add-on by Alain Ducharme (original author), Andrew Palmer (Blender 2.80)

https://github.com/andyp123/blender_vhacd

SX Tools 2 detects the presence of the V-HACD add-on and utilizes it for mesh collider generation.

FrandSX/sxtools2-blender