Material inheritance in Painter?

[mark.sneddon]

Quick question, haven't found any way to do this so thought I'd post about it.

Is there any way to create a material layer / smart material in Painter which inherits properties from an outside file? An example would be that I create a blue plastic material in Designer, then import it into Painter as a smart material or filter. Then I change the Designer material to be a red plastic instead of a blue plastic, I would want that to update/reload inside Painter.

Is there any way to do this currently?

Thanks!

[Froyok]

Any ressources imported are embedded into the project with Substance Painter, to make the project standalone and work on any computer.
Therefor we don't support dynamic linking of ressources used in a project.

The only workflow at the moment is to reimport the ressource (by right-clicking on it in the shelf) and putting it again in the fill layer/tool that you are using.

[mark.sneddon]

Are there any plans to support similar functionality in Painter?

It seems like it would be very useful to have this functionality (as an option), as it would allow us to store a centralised library of materials under version control which are then applied to models in Painter using masks (and additional library-independent additive layers on top of the inherited materials) - and then easily propagate changes to the core material library throughout all production assets.

I think this will be a very strong workflow on a production scale if there was a way to do it in Painter, the functionality already exists in Designer and has proven to be very good in the past.

[Froyok]

Are there any plans to support similar functionality in Painter?

At the moment no. This will come eventually when we will improve the management of ressources in a Substance Painter projects. That won't happen soon however. Substance Painter projects rely on much more dependencies than what you produce in Substance Designer.

[mark.sneddon]

Do you have any kind of rough timeline or roadmap of when we can expect that?

Would you recommend looking into using the python API as an alternative, for example to automatically reload materials from the shelf?

[Froyok]

Do you have any kind of rough timeline or roadmap of when we can expect that?

No ETA sorry.

Would you recommend looking into using the python API as an alternative, for example to automatically reload materials from the shelf?

We only have the javascript api available, at the moment the API doesn't support ressource management.

[mark.sneddon]

  Thanks dude. Any chance you can move this thread to the feature requests subforum? I think this feature will be very beneficial to a lot of people.

Also, why would you choose javascript over Python? 

[Froyok]

Thanks dude. Any chance you can move this thread to the feature requests subforum? I think this feature will be very beneficial to a lot of people.

This has been request already in the past actually. However it's a long stretch from the current general behavior of Substance Painter, that's why it has a low priority right now.

Also, why would you choose javascript over Python? 

Javascript was already available via our framework (Qt), Python would have requested longer development time to be able to provide scripting.
You can give a look at our API via the help menu.