How to import mesh to create initial normal map?

[stevetalkowski]

Just digging in and getting a tad confused.  In order for Substance Painter to do it's thing, you need to have at least a normal map associated with your mesh, correct?  After watching some of the tutorials on youTube, I seem to recall that you can use Designer to bake out the normal map.  I can't, however, figure out how to import that mesh into Designer.  Is this possible?

Thanks,

-Steve

[Nicolas LIATTI]

Hi,

You need to have UVs associated with your mesh to be able to import in Painter. It's not necessary to have a normal map, as you can create it by painting.

On the other hand, you can indeed bake normal maps in Substance Designer. You just need to create a new substance, and drag&drop your mesh in the Explorer to import it.

Cheers,
Nicolas

[stevetalkowski]

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for the response.  Let me give you an idea of what I'm trying to accomplish.

I have a slew of robot characters that were box-modeled in Maya and rendered in Keyshot:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/15839047/March-of-Robots

I am very interested in using Substance Designer and Painter primarily for all the amazing grunge and dirt map texture creation.  I initially was exploring the Quixel suite (nDo and dDo) however, am finding it difficult to use via Parallels or Boot Camp, as I'm OS X native.  I am now focusing my energies on Allegorithmic.

So, I'd love to be able to import my current meshes and generate the required maps.  I see that I can import a mesh into Designer and generate out the required maps from there.  There are many instances where I have multiple pieces of geometry intersecting one another and would love to have the baking procedure take this into account.  I essentially combine the pieces into one .obj and export.  Is there a way that Designer can detect intersection so that I get the proper amount of AO?  I should note that, currently, I am not using this for any game workflow. I'm primarily interested in texture map generation and use for concept/render presentation purposes.

Thanks!

-Steve

[Wes McDermott]

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for the response.  Let me give you an idea of what I'm trying to accomplish.

I have a slew of robot characters that were box-modeled in Maya and rendered in Keyshot:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/15839047/March-of-Robots

I am very interested in using Substance Designer and Painter primarily for all the amazing grunge and dirt map texture creation.  I initially was exploring the Quixel suite (nDo and dDo) however, am finding it difficult to use via Parallels or Boot Camp, as I'm OS X native.  I am now focusing my energies on Allegorithmic.

So, I'd love to be able to import my current meshes and generate the required maps.  I see that I can import a mesh into Designer and generate out the required maps from there.  There are many instances where I have multiple pieces of geometry intersecting one another and would love to have the baking procedure take this into account.  I essentially combine the pieces into one .obj and export.  Is there a way that Designer can detect intersection so that I get the proper amount of AO?  I should note that, currently, I am not using this for any game workflow. I'm primarily interested in texture map generation and use for concept/render presentation purposes.

Thanks!

-Steve

Hi Steve!

It's me Wes You can use SD and SP to texture the robots with your workflow. To do this, you will use the multi-material aspects of the software. In terms of baking and the intersecting geo, you can use Ambient Occlusion from Mesh and make sure that ignore backface is enabled. Also, you can bake portions of a mesh based on the material ID. On the left side of the baking window, you will see the materials ID of the mesh. You can disable IDs and they won't be used in the bake. This can help if you want to make specific areas of the mesh and then re-comp the AO maps.

Let me know if you need any help! You can contact me at wes.mcdermott@allegorithmic.com.

Cheers!

Wes