Messages

1

Substance Designer - Discussions - Mirrored material is rotated 90 degrees on one side

 on: September 16, 2018, 05:08:15 am 

Trying to fight my way back to remembering how the heck SP works, I used to know fairly well but I've been away quite some times. I'm using this simple fin shape to try to work my way back. At the moment, per the two pics below, I put on a fill layer with a brushed aluminum material, turned on symmetry in the correct axis, and then rotated the material so the brush scratches were aligned with the fin's wind direction, and all looked good. Then I looked at the other side to find the scratches rotated 90 degrees, it's like a pinstripe suit with the stripes going sideways. What the hell?

I've turned up the scratch scale to make what I'm saying obvious. Anyone know why that is happening and what to do to fix it?

2

Substance Painter - Technical Support - Why does my height channel painting look terrible?

 on: September 15, 2018, 06:40:51 am 

I've been away from SP for quite a while and find I've forgotten almost everything and am running into some basic (i.e., dumb) issues.

One of which is the below, I'm trying to paint simple panel lines using alphas and brushes, and  the resolution looks very low and the result is terrible. I remember this being easy before, so I must be missing something obvious.

At first I thought it was the fairly low document resolution (1024) but I ramped it up to 4096 to test and it made no difference.

3

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: how to export material 2d view as texture

 on: January 26, 2016, 03:17:12 am 

Zoom to whatever level you want, do a few screen captures, and assemble in Photoshop.

4

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Crazy Painting everywhere!

 on: January 21, 2016, 12:33:50 pm 

Yes you have overlapping UVs and generally messed up UVs. You can't have overlaps and you want to size all clusters relative to each other equally so all surfaces have the same texel density.

5

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: SPainter runs slow

 on: January 16, 2016, 07:59:21 am 

Sounds like you have some technical issue above normal Painter slowness. I suggest you go over to the technical support forum and ask them there.

I do skin sets on mechs with a single texture set, just use layer masks to control what goes where. So yes I don't see any reason you couldn't have done pretty much anything with a single texture set.

(What would be more effective here? Processor/CPU and motherboard or graphics card?)

Yes. People have tried an abacus but it really doesn't work as well as you'd think. Get the fastest processor, most mem, and fastest graphics card you can afford. You'll never totally beat Painter no matter what hardware you get. I have i7/5930 with water cooling, overclocked from 3.7 to 4.2Ghz, 2 x GTX 970 (although Painter prefers a single video card), and 32Gb DDR4 since Painter was choking on my scenes with 16Gb. And even with all that, Painter just giggles and crushes the interactibility in 4k unless I turn everything but one layer off.

6

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Making Alphas to use as stamps for height maps

 on: January 16, 2016, 07:02:25 am 

Brush alphas are just arbitrary-sized grayscale images. Just create a new file or open one in PS and then do image>mode>grayscale and save it. Drag it from wherever it's saved to your shelf in Painter or save it in your /shelf/alphas folder and it will be there next time you restart Painter.

7

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Designer/Photoshop Style Overlay Blend Mode in Painter (sRGB)

 on: January 15, 2016, 09:48:27 pm 

Having significantly differential results for the same function between two of your own products is something not generally recommended and is guaranteed to result in lengthy support discussions like this.

And having it work differently from the product where pretty much everyone learns blending modes (Photoshop) is also guaranteed to result in questions and confusion, even if Painter's way is technically superior.

So I'm with the OP, there should be two Overlay blending modes (linear and standard sRGB), allowing the user the choose the one appropriate for their use.

8

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Few general questions regarding Substance Painter

 on: January 14, 2016, 08:25:55 pm 

There are several threads on the first page now discussing the slowness and strategy for dealing with it, please take a look. In short, 1) shut down everything you can to preserve memory since Painter is an epic memory hog, 2) disable SLI if you have it since Painter runs better on a dedicated GPU, 3) work in low res as much as possible, only exporting high res, 4) turn off every layer and texture set you're not working on at the moment, or at least every layer above the one you're working on in the stack.

9

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: SPainter runs slow

 on: January 13, 2016, 02:12:22 am 

Great response, thanks. In all tutorials I see they use 2K as default and only temporarily test in 4K. Perhaps, as you suggested, when my file starts to chug I should actually go down to 1K when sliding parameters of dirt shaders etc. Get it 'generally' right and then quickly test it in 2K before moving on. I'm also wondering if I really need my position and thickness maps in there, I'm guessing those add to the calculations too? I've never come across these types of maps before, perhaps I don't need them for a simple asset.

I don't generally bake thickness as I've not come across a function I want to use that requires it. Position however, IS required if you're going to use generators like Ground Dirt - it has to know what is close to the ground and what isn't and it uses the position map. Some others I use semi-frequently do as well.

And yes, you're getting the idea on how to work around the slowness - always be in the lowest res you can be to do what you need to do and then export whatever your final res is. The only pain is maintaining and switching between baked map sets. I don't do this as I have some hefty hardware, but if I were you I'd bake the maps at 2k and 1k at least, export and and then reimport one set so both will be present in your available texture list. Then you can toggle between them fairly quickly when you switch res.

10

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Beginner Question About Repeating Mats

 on: January 10, 2016, 12:18:17 am 

In general your first option is a fill layer, and you add a mask if you need to limit where it is applied. And you can configure that mask quickly by selecting the mask, going to geometry mode (4 key), and clicking on the triangle/polygon/object you do or don't want the material to apply to. Or you can hand paint the mask. Or more interesting, you can right click on the mask and add a generator that configures the mask for dirt or edge wear. Easiest way to do overall dirt is add a fill layer with an unsaturated matte brown color for the fill, then add a dirt generator and fiddle the settings and voila, nice looking dirt all over your model.

Hand painting is only for trim and details and grunge, and in most cases that's stamping rather than clicking and dragging, or click one, hold shift key down, and click again in another spot to draw a straight line in one shot.

11

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Smart Material Stretching [SOLVED]

 on: January 09, 2016, 09:09:30 pm 

Awesome thanks, this was the problem. Also new to Blender and didn't realize some scaling functions affect the UV map.

That isn't exclusive to Blender, that's an issue common to all modelers I'm aware of. In MAX we use a "reset xForm" function to clear the slate of previous changes prior to applying UVs to prevent that particular issue. I don't use Blender, maybe they have something similar.

Also you need to remember that the only change to the geometry of your model that you can make post-UVs without screwing them up is a uniform scale. ALL other geometric changes will trash your UVs and you'll have to do them again, even if it's moving just one vertex or flipping the direction of an edge. Only uniform scale, which maintains the relationship of all of your geometry, can be safely done post-UVs.

There are quite a few good packages out there now that do automatic unwrapping quite effectively, especially on simple non-organic shapes like your example. Unless you really enjoy doing them by hand, you might want to try one of those- they can cut many hours out of your workflow.

12

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: SPainter runs slow

 on: January 09, 2016, 05:57:39 am 

Surely most people work with multiple texture sets and multiple layers? I'm not doing anything crazy am I?

Bottom line is that Painter is on the hairy edge of the technology curve, it is easily capable of slowing any hardware available (4k scene, several texture sets, lots of layers, working with all of them turned on) so people running more mainstream hardware need to crank back all the settings (work at 1024 and export 4k) and as much as possible enable only a single layer.

With your setup, you need to think of enabling all layers and a switch to 4k like a test render in a modeler, then switch them back off to continue work. Yes it'd be nice to be able to see everything all the time as you work, but I could say that about MAX as well- even when I enable 2k viewport textures and set the viewport to use scene lights from an HDR environment, it's a highly degraded view that degrades further and has to re-render lights and shadows every time I move something. Only time I see what it "really" looks like is when I render the scene.

The problem is that Painter seems much more like Photoshop than MAX/Maya/etc., so we expect to be able to work with it like Photoshop. But it's more like a Photoshop with multiple Vray instances running under it, trying to render everything every second, and that's what you need to be thinking when deciding on hardware requirements.

I have hopes for optimizations from Allegorithmic. The other "holy electric bat-monkeys" moment is when you see the size of the project files. The one I'm working on right now where I am experimenting with some smart materials and have 6 or so currently in the scene along with my painting layers is > 1Gb. For a 1500 poly mesh. Yes I know I can turn those smart materials into textures once I stop fiddling settings, but even my final trimmed-down project files for most of these are >500Mb even with only a few skin configurations present.

13

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Shader preset with spec/gloss?

 on: January 05, 2016, 10:16:19 pm 

Someone's confused here. Probably me, but not sure how.

I have no complaints with this. And I'm confused as to why both of you think there'd be no difference in appearance between using M/R and S/G as I see them all the time and I'd be more surprised if significantly different basic rendering models didn't result in visibly different results.

Below is the gold armor material with M/R and S/G.

14

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Shader preset with spec/gloss?

 on: January 05, 2016, 08:44:52 am 

These are game assets being rendered in an ancient 3D engine that is probably the worst code ever to be associated with Microsoft. And "worst code ever written by Microsoft" is roughly equivalent in badness to "Klingon field medic" bad. Really, really bad. I and a couple other guys working through replacing all the mech models and setting up a skin system for each in Painter.

Below is actually the first instance I've had a new model with the 1.7 baked lighting up in game, this was a first quick cut, very little time to sit down and focus on it with holidays. Looking at it... well I just need to fiddle with the baked lighting filter a bunch more, and probably materials too, my nice near-black weapons have turned into almost solid specular reflection.

By the way, seems to me the saturation of the default sky in the baked lighting filter is very high, much higher than values I've seen for CIE and other physically-based models.

15

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: Post processing question?

 on: January 05, 2016, 03:37:43 am 

I just tried it again while paying attention and to me it's not of much value in its current form. It looks more like a blur filter than antialiasing when you toggle it on and off.

Also, Allegorithmic folks - at least on my machine, vignette is turned on any time I toggle on the post effects, and the Vignette toggle does nothing. I'm assuming that's not intended.