I'm confused about custom inputs in Painter.

throttlekitty

How can I set up a substance in Designer for Painter, so that custom inputs can drive attributes? In my simple test, I'm creating bricks, warping, then blurring. I want to have "painterly" control in Painter over the warp intensity and blur amount. The best I can do in Painter is apply a bitmap or generator, and those work as expected. I was hoping to create additional paint layers inside the substances fill layer and assign those for control, but I can't find a way to do this. Is this possible?

I realize that in this case I would run these effects as separate layers in Painter, so pretend there's some stuff happening down the chain that make painting here important.

Also, what's up with that ghost box around "blur amount"? I get this on nodes now and again and can't figure out what it means.

Jerc

You could set it up so that the Warp Intensity input as a usage that corespon to a User channel in Painter (you can add user channels in the texture set settings). That way you have a "utility" channel dedicated to painting that kind of masks.
We will soon introduce layer linking too and that should make you life much easier for that kind of filters since you will be able to link that input to any element of your layer stack.

The ghost box just mean that the node is currently selected

throttlekitty

Thanks @Jerc, but there must be something I'm missing. In Painter, I can create the user channels but I'm still not seeing any result. I've tried naming my inputs as "user0" and "User0" just to be sure. Layer linking sounds nice!

The setup in Painter:

Fill Layer with my test material assigned.

Paint Layer inside that, where I'm brushing black and white with only user0 checked on my brush.

Here's my .sbsar file in case I goofed somewhere, if you don't mind checking?

And with that ghost box, that never goes away if another node is selected or is actively displaying in the 2d view. Note that it's bigger than the selected type, where the black border turns white.

edit: I wish I could find an example of this being done, it seems like a common thing but I can't find mentions of this anywhere. I'm also wondering if I've set this up in Designer incorrectly; I now have a secondary output "user0" that I can map to the User0 channel in Painter instead of basecolor. But again, no results.

Jerc

Did you follow these guidelines for naming? https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Channel+specific+filter
You should add a "user0" usage to your input (you can type it in the dropdown).
Also, to be able to paint on an input, you need to import it as an effect, not as a material, which do not support inputs.

throttlekitty

Ahhhh, that's the kicker, thank you. I did see that page, my problem was trying to do this in a material. Back to the drawing board!

Is there any technical reason why we can't use paint as an input but can slot a generator? Or will this functionality come with the layer linking you mentioned?

Jerc

This functionnality will come with the linking

throttlekitty