SD environment workflow question

[HapZungLam]

I have an environment set.  There has walls, floor, ceiling, and some wall lamp and wall carved decal.  They are all separated objects and each as carried a 1/1 UV.

Now I wonder what is the best work flow to use substance designer for both backing maps and texturing.  Considering to link those objects into SD.

Do I combine them together into 1 object? Do I keep them separate but export as 1 file?  Do I preassign different materials?   How can I work in SD so I can maybe like okay now I want to work on the wall texture.  I have an external wall texture to use and wanted to add some dirt / metal edge wear according to the curvature/ao map, ext.

[conradsly]

I think what your asking is whether or not you can import an entire scene into SD. As far as I know, you can't. You could export your scene as 1 object like you said, and then use SD to bake out some material ID masks, but I would recommend working on each asset separately and then assemble them with textures in another engine or renderer. This way each obj can have more resolution to make your textures look that much better

So for your scene, I might make 1 wall, use SD to make a procedural texture for the wall with exposed parameters, take the substance into UE4 or 3ds max or whatever you want to render in, duplicate the wall and change the exposed parameters to create variations of the wall, assemble the different walls into your scene. This way you can create 1 texture for 4 or infinity walls that all look different. So while you can't assemble the entire scene in SD right now, you can absolutely use the power of SD to create infinite variation for modular assets.

[HapZungLam]

THank you.  I'll give that a try

[Nicolas Wirrmann]

You can export a single fbx/obj file containing multiple objects (each one having its own material assigned).
In SD you see the 3 materials in the 3D View so you can assign a graph to each of these materials.

For the baking, you'll have to select manually in the tree view which object belongs to one of the 3 materials and repeat the step for each material (we'll provide a way to select objects by material in the bakers in a future version).