Invite Thoughts on Substance Painter as Part of Work Flow?
Diomede
Posts: 15,169
Substance Painter is an option for making materials and shaders for models. The Daz store is slated to offer a tutorial in the not-too-distant-future, as per the following thread. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/197331/substance-painter-training-this-saturday-inc-20-discount-on-sp-commercial#latest
Anyone use it as part of your workflow? Thoughts? Reviews?
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SP doesn't work for me. It doesn't paint across seams, it has very messy, unfriendly interface. After long and painful research I discovered one thing: only Blender could be better than Blender. I like Blacksmith as well. It useful enough for me. It paints across seams and it has clone tool which is necessary in figure painting stuff.
Thanks, very helpful to learn about the issue with the seams.
It does paint across seams, so long as they're on the same UV map. But it won't paint across UV maps, that's true.
Oh, OK. Good to know about the uvmaps. Still an issue, but not necessarly as catastrophic. How do you use SP in your workflow, if you do?
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For example, if I were modeling a little red wagon for kid (model in Carrara, Hexagon, Blender, or whatever), how does SP improve the workflow?
That depends on how you previously would have painted it.
I make stuff with SP in mind, so as to minimise any adjustment later. That kinda comes with practice - figuring what works well and what doesn't. For example: Don't assign surface groups/shader domains until after you've painted it, cos each domain generates a separate set of texture sheets, and if you're sharing the same map, that just gets wasteful.
Make sure you've got good UVs with no overlaps and minimal distortion. Carrara can sometimes (often) produce UVs that look like knotted string. You definitely need to unpick those! You can still double up identical props/parts on the same island, and painting one will paint them all. but if you've got the space to spread them out, spread them out.
SP comes with lots of materials & there are tons of free ones, or free-with-the-subscription ones. You do need to bear in mind that it's a PBR painter and Carrara isn't PBR, so there won't be an exact match. Metals by far come over the worst. (don't forget that once you've exported to SP - use FBX, that works by far the best - you can add your shader domains, and use native metallic shaders as a base if you want.
There are some imprecise mappings for the maps:
Color = Diffuse
Glossiness = roughness inverted
Reflection = Metallic, but level heavily tweaked on a case by case basis
Shine = Specular, again tweaked. If you have Metalicity/Roughness set by default, you won't get this map, but you can add it in on a UV-by-uv basis
It won't be perfect, and some materials look better than others. But especially if you're looking to texture something for multiple renderers ( e.g. Iray, 3Delight, Carrara), it can get you 90% of the way there.
the 3d paint in carrara, cant paste an imported image, like a tramp stamp tattoo, across seams?
The UV map's seams are extremely important when painting on Genesis 3/8 figures for example. The UV map's seams don't matter when painting on custom figures where all UV islands are placed on one sheet.
Good question. I just did a test of using the stamp tool in Carrara's 3D Paint. It worked across a uvmap seam and across different shading domains. I take it, that would also work in Substance Painter as long as they were on the same uvmap.
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Yup, if they're on the same uv map.
Clarify my earliert comment: Don't pre-set up shading domains if they'd be on the same UV map. If you have two UV maps, you can have a domain for each. This is simply because SP generates a set of maps for each domain & you'd end up having to merge them back together.
OK, not sure I am following that clarification, but I think it is because I am not familiar enough with SP. Having the shader domains and seams at same time in Carrara helps me with unwrapping, and cleaning up the uvmaps. But presumably if I am turning to SP to improve materials I would turn elsewhere to improve uvmapping.
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SP will spit out one set of maps (diffuse, bump, normal, AO, metallic, roughness...) per shading domain. If you have (say) one UV map, but it's split into four shading domains, SP will generate four sets of maps, each one ONLY covering one domain. When you set up the shaders in Carrara, this is going to be hugely inefficient in terms of texture memory, since you're using 4 maps when you only needed 1.
You have the option of merging the maps in Photoshop or similar, but it's easier and quicker to have SP spit out the combined map in the first place.
If you've already created the domains, save your project, delete the domains, export (FBX), then reload your project.
If each shading domain is on its own UV map, then it's no problem to keep the domains.
I use more or less this same setup for SP textures in Carrara except I add a mixer in the Color and Reflection channels because if you are using the Metal/Roughness workflow then for metallic materials both the color and intensity of reflections are driven by the diffuse map with the metal map just telling you where it is metallic. So where the metal map shows something is metallic, the color should be black or nearly black and the reflection should be the diffuse map, and where the metal map shows something is non-metallic the color should be the color map, but I use the inverted roughness in the reflection channel.
You can create export presets to export the specific maps you need for different programs and I have one for Carrara that exports the maps Tim lists above, with each named using the Carrara channel name.
I attended the live webinar for this and while it was interesting, it is NOT a tutorial on Substance Painter despite the title. Very little time is actually spent in SP. It focuses on model preparation before going into SP and on material setup in DS and Poser after you exit SP.
I'm a big fan of the Digital Art Live webinars - they are great opportunities to ask experts specific questions and get direct feedback and examples - but I wouldn't recommend this one. You will learn everything that is covered in the SP-specific parts by just watching the learning videos on Allegorithmic's YouTube channel and can find more information on using the maps to setup materials in DS in the forums here.
I'm a little behind on the terminology ... what you are describing with one domain and one map ... is that a Texture Atlas?
In this case, if finer detail in the texture is required in a specific area, doesn't the resolution need to be increased on the entire map?
just released
Thanks, Magaremoto. Will definitely take a look at 3DCoat.
3Dcoat is much better than SP, it paints across UV (or different domains) islands and bakes textures.
Thanks - and I see that 3DCoat has retopology. That would be very good to have for a ariety of reasons.
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This is interesting - thanks to all for the inputs.
Question - DS has a "Texture Atlas" tool that seems to allow users to manage and move their UV maps around. Per TangoAlpha's comments, would there be any value in using such a tool to consolidate the relevant UVs this way, before going into Substance Painter, and re-oraganizing them again in DS once done in SP?
I would assume that each re-organization results in a bit of jpeg conversion loss in the image maps. I would guess that loss won't matter when going *to* SP, but would result in a bit of softening when re-working them in DS's Texture Atlas? Would it matter that much?
cheers,
--ms
Well, except for the painting across domains, SP does all that too; it paints just fine across seams and UV islands and is genuinely very good (in my experience) and amazingly fast at baking textures. Allegorithmic is supposed to add the ability to paint across domains too at some point, but they've been saying that for a very long time and it has never been added in several updates, so who knows if they are really even working on it.
3Dcoat has always looked like a more full-featured program to me, but a couple years ago I somehow ended up with a demo version and I just didn't like the interface. That's a personal thing though, not really a critique of the program and I only watched one or two videos and spent about 4-5 hours playing with it, which isn't giving any new program enough of a chance. Plus, I know I am weird, because I really like Blender's interface, so take that into account whenever I comment on anything's interface.
I am also a Blender's big fan. After all the ordeal with finding a suitable program for painting skins I went back to the beloved Blender. So now I am painting and baking with Blender.
Good to know. I am playing with the blender for artists plugin (if that is the right word) to try to ease into Blender. I'm afraid I am one of the people who has repeatedly struggled with the interface.
For Genesis and similar, workflow I use:
Go in app of choice (I use Daz Studio) and group all surfaces sharing same maps (ie: fingernails + forearms + hands + shoulders + toenails + feet + legs -> forearms)
Hide/delete stuff like eyes and mouth, for now.
make sure I'm in the uv set I want.
Export (collapse tiles if working with G3/G8)
Open UV mapper (free app!)
Load model, edit > tile > by materials. Untick box for scaling.
Save model.
You will have the entire skin on one map, basically laid out in a 2 map by 2 map square.
Open new model in Substance Painter, do your business with everything on one surface. Woo!!
Export maps at 8190x8190 resolution.
In image editor, crop the big map into 3-4 maps at 4K resolution. This can be a little tedious; what I usually do is put all the maps into a Photoshop layered image, save it, change canvas size, then save out each layer.
Revert to the saved layer file, cut canvas differently, repeat.
And now you have a set of maps for your original model, and avoid the issues SP has with multiple surfaces.
This is awesome - thanks so much for sharing your workflow on this. I can't wait to try it out!
I'm not sure I understand what you are doing with this part though:
I get what you mean about surfaces sharing the same maps, but what do you mean by grouping them? Is this some specific process in DS?
I'm not completely DS-ignorant, I used it for a few years before switching to primarily Carrara (and later to about 75% Blender and 25% Carrara), and I have the most recent version of DS and use it for rigging things but I don't remember ever hearing anything about grouping surfaces before.
It sounds like maybe you are collapsing them into one surface somehow?
In DS:
Drop in a figure.
Tools > Geometry Editor
windows> Tool Settings
You'lll see a list of Face Groups, Surfaces, Regions. Collapse Face groups and Regions, we're ignoring that.
Click the + next to each surface (if you hit the wrong one, remove it by hitting -)
Once you have all the surfaces you want, right-click on one surface name and select 'Assign Selected Faces to Group'
You've basically selected a bunch of the mesh and are reassigning it to one surface name.
When you are done, you should have 3-5 surfaces with faces on them. Click on the Eye next to surfaces you don't want to bother with (eyes, mouth, eyelashes, etc), to hide them.
Export as obj. I THINK you should make sure Ignore Invisible Nodes is selected, but I'm not sure it matters.
Thanks for the explanation.
That's pretty much what I thought you were saying, I just wasn't sure how to do it in DS since I usually do all my surface setup and editing in Blender (or Carrara for small pieces made just to be used in a single Carrara scene). But since in this case I'd probably be starting and ending in DAZ Studio, just doing it there makes more sense.
I tried 3DCoat today but I don't know where to place each exported layer into Carrara.
Is someone could explain me this process and the best settings to export from 3DC?
Here is an excellent tutorial on 3d coat painting workflow:
I don't have 3DCoat so I don't know what it exports - can you list what "layers" got exported? A few people here use it and can probably say for sure what goes where, while those of us that don't use it (like me!) can try to make some educated guesses based on the names.