Is my substance painter slower than intended?
polycounter lvl 11
Hey guys. I have a quick question for you guys. My substance designer appears to be painting very slowly. Each time I attempt to make a brush stroke, I receive a few seconds of lag. If I make enough strokes then all of the strokes eventually start showing up in due time. Normally when this happends there could be two general causes.
1: Outdated PC hardware: I doubt this is the case. I have a 6 core Intel CPU with 32GB of RAM. As for my video card I have a GeForce 980GTX so I can't imagine this being an issue.
2: Conflicts with other programs: I had Painter, Marmoset and a game running. That could be it right? I closed everything down and restarted substance. Same result.
I began to dig a little deeper. It turns out that if I disable my 2 "rust" fill layers I get strokes that keep up with me. I don't know why this would slow everything down so much. My first rust fill layer is a 4096^2 texture map of "rust." It has a 4096 Targa mask that I manually painted in Photoshop. The second layer is a yellow fill layer with the same mask and a height displacement. The difference in time between strokes with/without these layers visible are entire seconds. Is this normal or is there some tweak I forgot to do?
1: Outdated PC hardware: I doubt this is the case. I have a 6 core Intel CPU with 32GB of RAM. As for my video card I have a GeForce 980GTX so I can't imagine this being an issue.
2: Conflicts with other programs: I had Painter, Marmoset and a game running. That could be it right? I closed everything down and restarted substance. Same result.
I began to dig a little deeper. It turns out that if I disable my 2 "rust" fill layers I get strokes that keep up with me. I don't know why this would slow everything down so much. My first rust fill layer is a 4096^2 texture map of "rust." It has a 4096 Targa mask that I manually painted in Photoshop. The second layer is a yellow fill layer with the same mask and a height displacement. The difference in time between strokes with/without these layers visible are entire seconds. Is this normal or is there some tweak I forgot to do?
Replies
Are you painting on a layer itself on all the channels at once or on a layer mask?
Does the performance improve when you just hide the layers or when you delete them only?
This happens regardless of the layer I'm painting on. As long as my "rust" layer is visible then the issue occurs. I don't have to delete the rust layer for a performance increase. I just have to disable it's visibility. The actual rust texture being masked is a PNG while the mask is a TGA. I tried unifying the formats to TGA in case some weird file format issues happened but that did not appear to do much
Ok, a 4k layer visibility should not affect performances that much especially if it's not procedural. Would you be able to send me a minimal repro project for me to look at?
The GPU is what is going to be the bottleneck. Make sure you have 3GB of VRAM if you want to be comfortable painting in high resolution. Also 12 or 16GB of Ram, but this is pretty standard nowadays.
A Painter project embeds everything it needs, so you don't have to worry about links or dependencies.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w0g89y3j48oow7q/Mailbox2.spp?dl=0
No pun intended, but I openly point my finger at poor programming logic from Allegorithmic's behalf on this issue. For the simplistic nature of what I am doing for texture painting through mask channels. It's rather absurd should my software slow down at all. Considering I'm using a beefy system (much similar to (daniellooartist) as stated for this thread.
This is just me, but I feel like Painter needs "Modes" to enter to use certain things. Just to cut the cost of heavier things from running in the background while doing more simplistic bits. I get that the goal is to make a super painting package. But I can't help but to wonder if whats running under the hood of the software the heaviest is the "Physical painting brushes". Which I hardly ever use.
I only hope Allegorithmic will cease most of its efforts on Designer, and assert every effort into fixing & bring Painter to what its original intent is to become. If otherwise from that, just merge the two. It's pretty bad already that the two have 2 different baking algorithms for reading to-be-mirrored geometry.
One thing should help a lot if you have a NVidia GPU: In the 3D Settings, turn off the Threaded Optimization option (it is on Auto by default).
Please let me know if you see any performance improvement.
Could you elaborate on this please? Both Painter and Designer share the same codebase for the baking and there should be no difference at all between the 2.
I've experienced when baking a normal map on half'd geometry w/ uv's (including both sided geo, with mirrored uv's in the 2nd uv set in flipped status.) Substance Painter, the seams are flawless. When I bake a normal map in substance designer. The seams are very present.
My co-worker who had used substance at work brought this up numerous times. I had to see for myself if the results were that, and they still are unfortunately.
Where is this setting located in Painter? I can't find it, and the online documentation only searches "substance designer" for said search "Threaded Optimization".
Sorry, this is a setting in the NVidia Control Panel.
What versions of the Nvidia drivers are those? I would not mind to return to older versions if that makes quicker painter.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3j4udyd7hqlxi8g/lowMailbox.fbx?dl=0