My thoughts on Painter so far / list of requests and bugs

[pdub87@gmail.com]

Really love painter, I'll get straight to the requests / bugs / issues. Skipping a few features that I know are on the roadmap.

• MORE SHADERS - I know this is on the roadmap, but can't skip this one.. Desperately need different shader support. At the very least, a standard diffuse/normal/spec shader. Really hard to make non-pbr assets with a PBR shader; colors always end up coming out wacky. This is a huge problem for me right now. Looking at diffuse channel is kind of a workaround, but you cant see specular or normals so its really not much of a workaround. Anyways, I know this is planned but would love to see it asap.
• Selection Tools - selecting polys in the 3d view is really bad. Need backface selection on/off. There are some depth sorting issues where I will select a poly, and it will completely miss the poly I intended to select, and select a backface poly on the other side of the mesh.
• Pre-Selection Highlight - if I am hovering over a poly, or a UV shell, highlight the shell I'm hovering over. Show me what I am going to select, before I select it.
• edit layer mask without hitting alt -  I want to edit a layer mask without hitting ALT to go into the layer view. For example, I want to smooth the seam on the side of my mask. I can hit ALT and click on the mask to go in and edit the mask, but I would like to do this without going into the mask view. It doesn't seem like there is a way to edit the mask without hitting alt and going into mask view. It just draws white straight into my layer instead of drawing on the mask. This is when I have the layer MASK selected btw, red box around the mask, and its still drawing on the layer itself unless I click alt and go into the layer.
• Export All Channels "save as png" dialog - this needs to use a DIRECTORY dialog box, instead of a "Save as PNG" dialog box. When I go to export all channels, it's asking me to select a .PNG to save as, when its REALLY asking you which folder you want to save into. Please fix, highly annoying.
• Export All Channels - let me specify a prefix or filename pattern, similar to the way the Standalone B2M Player lets you use different formatting on the files you output.  Right now painter just exports "diffuse.png", "normal.png", etc.
• Drag / Drop images into Substance Painter - its annoying to h ave to "Import Image", let me drag images into the shelf.
• TextureSets - show all the "texture sets" that you have painted on in painter, even if the material is no longer on the mesh. Also allow renaming of texturesets in painter. I'm not sure what happened but my material name got changed or something when I imported my mesh again, and all the work I did in painter disappeared. I got it to work by renaming the material on the mesh and reimporting, but then something else got borked and it was throwing bugs when I was trying to export, and every time I would reopen the project it would bug out.
• Project structure - would be cool if there was an option to save a substance painter project as a single file, instead of a whole slew of directories and separate files.
• Cluttered UI, weird UI design - overall the UI is really cluttered. From a user experience point of view, the design of the UI is kind of confusing.  Basic "elements of design" are off. In particular, the hierarchy, proximity, and contrast of many UI elements (especially the tool panel, material panel, etc) is really wacky. If something works like a dropdown menu, show it like a dropdown menu. If somethings a button, make it look like a button. If elements are children of a panel, show the hierarchy visually for the children, so I can just look at it and know. When you start to drag an image from your textures, maybe highlight the slots in the UI where you can drop it (diffuse, etc). I know it's a beta but yeah.
• User Interface Scaling - I have a 12" surface pro 3, it's impossible to use Substance Painter on such a high DPI, small screen. Please allow for user interface scaling.

I'll keep updating this thread as I use Painter,   so devs you better subscribe to this jazz!

[pdub87@gmail.com]

Memory / texture corruption - having issues w/ texture corruption.
Remove textures / images from the shelf - it seems like once I have them in there, I cant remove them.
Up-scaling document size - buggy. If i texture at 1k doc size, then upscale it to 2k, it gets completely messed up. Also, this process easily eats up my entire system ram.
Stencil Flood from Camera let's say I'm in 2d view or 3d view with a stencil, I just want to flood the entire screen with the stencil.
Ortho camera view - think i saw this in the roadmap somewhere, would be useful.
Lasso Selection Tool - need more than just a rectangular marquee selection tool.

[pdub87@gmail.com]

Bug: multi mesh export fails when a material name contains an invalid character, such as ':'

then after re-opening project with a bad material name, I think substance painter renames the material, replacing ':' with '_'  causing things to get out of sync..

[pdub87@gmail.com]

Annoyance:  when you double click in a layer name to rename it,  and then move the mouse pointer away from the text field, it will unfocus the text field.

its super annoying because i will double tap on a layer to rename it, with my cintiq pen in my hand, then move my hand to the keyboard to type, and the text field loses focus.

just make it standard so enter key confirms the rename operation, or unfocus the text field with a click outside of the text field.

[pdub87@gmail.com]

Annoyance: Color picker sucks. This thing, guys... it needs some love. It's apparently for like color theory scientists or something. I'm not a color theory  duder with all his hues and saturations and values memorized. Let's get a visual color picker up in here.

[pdub87@gmail.com]

Feature Request:   Stencil Rotation Snapping
would be great if you could hold SHIFT while using S + LMOUSE to snap the rotation of the stencil. Similar to how you can snap the rotation of the 2D and 3D views.

Feature Request:  Save Currently Loaded Brush / Stencil / Tool Settings within Project
It seems like my stencil materials are saved some where. It would be great if it would save your currently loaded tool settings / preferences in as part of the project.

For instance, I am using a stencil. I reload my project. It would be cool if it automatically loaded up the stencil I was using previously.

[Nicolas LIATTI]

Bug: multi mesh export fails when a material name contains an invalid character, such as ':'

then after re-opening project with a bad material name, I think substance painter renames the material, replacing ':' with '_'  causing things to get out of sync..

Can you please log all the bugs, such as this one, directly in Painter in the Report a Bug window?

Thanks!
Nicolas

[Jeremie Noguer]

Thanks for all the feedback, everything is noted

[sgr33r]

-->  Remove textures / images from the shelf - it seems like once I have them in there, I cant remove them.

This please! My OCD is making me nuts not being able to clean up the shelf.

Also, i'm using a .psd texture as a base, then painting details over that in S.P.   ...is there a way to highlight (in the shelf) the currently applied texture on a 3d mesh?  I have multiple image imports in the shelf, with very small differences, and it would be nice to quickly know which of the images is being applied.

Thanks,

Sam

[jmuley@fiea.ucf.edu]

I really enjoyed using painter and was able to get up and running fairly quickly.

I love photoshop and using solid colors with layer masks. This set up was very easy to use/emulate in painter so I felt at home.

I'm also using ue4 and that is my final target that I am pushinh to. It did seem that the final look and values were a bit off to me. I would really like a ue4 specific pbr shader.

Also need to get emissive working like ue5.

Need a sss shader (again I want to feed into ue4)

Ue4 has a specular slot to thier shader and I would like that as well.

Also need a tesselation shader along with crack free displacement.

I have recently tried designer...I have watched quite a few videos and have been using the program for 2 solid days and still feel very lost compared to painter.

I am trying to blend nodes, convert height to normals,  blend normals and tile my textures. It really feels like things that should be simple are not.

I'm reallu wondering why these two products are so differnt from each ohther. Make our life easier and unify some functionality so we don't have to learn 2 ways of acomplishing the same task in software that is made by the same company and are suppose to talk to one another.

Also feels very weird that I can't just share my project between the two apps and go back and forth at will.

I really am starting to wonder why this isn't just one paint app??