Right, so what you are looking for in indeed the backface culling in the properties of a brush !
I've been playing around quite a lot with the backface culling option since it was suggested, and I'm still not able to get the behaviour I expect.
Using Alignment: Camera, Size Space: Object, and a six sided cylinder with backfacing culling on and an angle even a little below 90, I STILL get streaking -- the only change is that now the brush is applying the texture much more faintly.
If I go lower than 60ish, no texture is applied regardless of how I orient the camera.
I also notice that I can not turn off the pen pressure on brushes. I don't use a tablet, so I'm wondering if that may be causing brush not applying any texture when backface culling is on.
Right now for painting out seams, I'm finding I have to use Alignment: Camera, Size Space: Texture (to make sure the texture matches the size of any fill layers), ignore the backface culling, and then just mask out the streaking problem by hand using the UV alignment.
This is not super terrible for my workflow, but it does seem like an extra step compared to Mudbox or 3D Coat. On the flip side, the texture quality is generally much more sharp in crisp in Substance Painter than in Mudbox (by far, Mudbox gets blurry fast).
Further, on thin components, backface culling does nothing useful regardless of the settings. It still paints on both sides, or it doesn't paint at all. By "thin," I mean "the size of a human character's torso." If backface culling actually fixed THIS problem, I'd be very happy.
The backface culling option is broken in 1.2 and will be fixed shortly, sorry for that
Wow, I was actually expecting this to still be a case of user error on my part. Heh.
Good to know it'll be fixed!
[Edit] Also, the brush tool seems noticably more laggy than it used to be. Every long stroke makes SP stutter a bit, and a red line appears briefly above the shelf (I guess a processing indicator?).
I have an i7 4770k, NVIDEA GeForce GTX 680 w/ 4 GB, and 16 GB system ram, that was more than enough to handle SP before on any quality setting, so I'm thinking something changed in the last update.
Here's something I just noticed -- nowhere in the UI does it tell you the name of the project you currently have opened, haha.
Doesn't say it in the window name, in the document settings, or in the viewport... it doesn't even put it as the file name when you select "Save as."
If I'm missing where this info is, let me know.
Also, is there a way to clear the content of a layer WITHOUT removing the mask? Often times I want to reuse the same mask, so I dupe a layer, but then I'm stuck using the erase tool instead of cntrl-A + DEL like I'm used to in Photoshop.
Also, the brush tool seems noticably more laggy than it used to be. Every long stroke makes SP stutter a bit, and a red line appears briefly above the shelf (I guess a processing indicator?).
The red bar is indeed a computation/progress bar.
Does it happen with every brush you have ? Brushes with a substances require more computation than regular bitmap/uniform colors.
Also, is there a way to clear the content of a layer WITHOUT removing the mask? Often times I want to reuse the same mask, so I dupe a layer, but then I'm stuck using the erase tool instead of cntrl-A + DEL like I'm used to in Photoshop.
In you case, the best is to create a new layer, then copy the content of the mask (right-click on the original mask -> copy mask) and then paste it on the mask of the new layer (right click -> paste mask).
The red bar is indeed a computation/progress bar.
Does it happen with every brush you have ? Brushes with a substances require more computation than regular bitmap/uniform colors.
Yup, it happens with every brush, even if it's just a plain colour. Full substances are noticably more laggy of course.
What I've noticed is that it happens mainly when I have images in the "additional maps" slots. Especially when the Ambient Occlusion slot is filled.
With no additional map slots filled, I don't usually see any lag. With just a normal map, lag happens sometimes (and isn't too much a problem). With an AO slot filled, laggy strokes happen almost always.
This is at 2048x2048 (main image + all additional slots) and using medium quality settings. NVIDIA drivers are up to date.
In you case, the best is to create a new layer, then copy the content of the mask (right-click on the original mask -> copy mask) and then paste it on the mask of the new layer (right click -> paste mask).
what I' m asking for is the ALBEDO, because the metal areas will be black and the base color moves in the reflectance map. So I would like to check the albedo before export it.
Also I think would be great to have an alternative workflow like albedo+ reflectance + glossyness. Infact at the moment is not possible to chance the reflectance manually, and everything is non-metal has 60,60,60 value and no way to change it manually.
Hey just wanted to drop by and show some love for the guys working on Substance Painter. You guys are KILLING IT! Keep up the awesome work and thank you for this AMAZING tool!
Only thing I wish I could see sooner is clone brush then this program will be my main squeeze.
Thanks again guys!
Also some suggestions:
What about a button to hide all shelves. Kind of like Photoshops expert mode. This way you can get everything out of the way real quick and focus just on painting.
Also another suggestion would be an Add Mesh to Project. This way I can work on an object and when I want to add something else into the scene i can just import that object instead of creating a new export file and collapsing my layers down.
Also another suggestion would be an Add Mesh to Project. This way I can work on an object and when I want to add something else into the scene i can just import that object instead of creating a new export file and collapsing my layers down.
You can add elements to your scene by using the Edit>Project Configuration menu. just add your new element to your original FBX in your 3d program and reimport it through this menu, there shouldn't be anything else to do.
You can add elements to your scene by using the Edit>Project Configuration menu. just add your new element to your original FBX in your 3d program and reimport it through this menu, there shouldn't be anything else to do.
Man.... :poly121: I knew it would be something simple. Thanks Jerc!
Most of the alphas shipped in Painter are simple sbsar that can be opened in the Substance Player. You can export them as textures from there. You can find the default alphas in "My Documents\Substance Painter\shelf\allegorithmic\alphas".
Most of the alphas shipped in Painter are simple sbsar that can be opened in the Substance Player. You can export them as textures from there. You can find the default alphas in "My Documents\Substance Painter\shelf\allegorithmic\alphas".
Really starting to dig into Painter the past couple weeks. Amazing program, really enjoying it! Tons of things I love about it, a couple things mirroring a little of what EArkham was asking for, I think would be helpful:
1. Copy/Paste ability for substance effects, so I can paste similar effects into different layers or masks. (I don't think it exists so far, when I right-click the menus are grayed ouy)
2. Ability to change masks (say from bitmap ID to a white mask) without losing the effect I have tied to it. Is there a way to invert a black mask to white or vice versa as well?
3. A way to combine mat ID mask with black/white mask paint functions. (Not a huge deal, I have been assigning a bitmap ID mask to a group and then painting custom masks to individual contained layers).
Here's a specific but hopefully easily answerable question:
If I wanted to use some of the nice mesh adaptive effects from Substance Designer, for example, "rock_weathering.sbs" or ""moss_weathering.sbs" in Substance Painter, how would I do that?
I don't see an sbsar file that I can import into SP.
Here's a specific but hopefully easily answerable question:
If I wanted to use some of the nice mesh adaptive effects from Substance Designer, for example, "rock_weathering.sbs" or ""moss_weathering.sbs" in Substance Painter, how would I do that?
I don't see an sbsar file that I can import into SP.
Does exposing parameters work differently in Substance Painter?
As a test, I've published a copy of the moss weathering effect as an sbsar, with the identifiers correctly named, and while I can then use it in Sub Painter as an effect, it has no parameters exposed (even though they're clearly exposed in SD prior to publishing).
Additionally, the icon doesn't show up either, but that's a pretty minor thing.
No parameters sounds like a bug, can you send me the sbsar ?
For the icon that's normal, the icon is not saved in an sbsar. That's part of the data that are removed when cooking.
I've been trying various things to try and get the exposed parameters to appear in the publish dialogue or in Substance Painter, all without success. Doesn't seem to matter whether I'm using a default sbs or a totally fresh file with exposed parameters. Regardless of what's exposed, the only parameters that appear are "random seed," "pixel size," and "output size," and the only one that will show in Painter is "random seed."
I'm really hoping this is just a user error thing on my part.
Is there really still no way of expanding 3D viewport to full screen or hide all menus? What's the current best method? All I can think of is to close all menus and then reset layout
I'm trying to set up a custom export preset where AO is output as a standard texture channel. So for an RGB, I'd want something like R - Roughness, G - Metallic, B - AO. I don't see an option to include AO (I'd want a simple passthrough, so it packs the AO input map). Would I need to do some kind of workaround using a User input map? I noticed your UE4 packed preset doesn't output AO either, is this something that can be added?
I'm trying to set up a custom export preset where AO is output as a standard texture channel. So for an RGB, I'd want something like R - Roughness, G - Metallic, B - AO. I don't see an option to include AO (I'd want a simple passthrough, so it packs the AO input map). Would I need to do some kind of workaround using a User input map? I noticed your UE4 packed preset doesn't output AO either, is this something that can be added?
Been said but I just wanted to mention it again, and also show my appreciation for the software Fabulous work so far guys , looking forward for 8K texture support and layered PSD . At the moment flattened exports are a bit annoying.
Hey guys, thought i'd chime in with some feedback!
I've been digging into substance painter in an attempt to work it into our pipeline at work. The main functionality I'm looking for, is the ability to stamp decals/details based on substance packages.
The process i'm experimenting with involves models with many uv shells that are auto unwrapped/packed based on smoothing groups. A side effect of this is that your uv layouts tend to not be very human readable. This is where painter saves the day, or rather... where I want it to save the day.
The basic idea of it works - I can make a substance that has several decals with settings like wear and tear, normal details, choosing which decal you're going to stamp, etc etc. This part of the process works amazingly and does exactly what I want.
The process of actually stamping the decals however... is quite another story. I have two main gripes with the current process, which if fixed would increase the usability by quite a lot - however there's even more room for improvement.
Issue 1 - The checkerboard of doom. When no alpha is selected, the transparent pixels of your substance material are represented by a 100% opaque checkerboard. This completely gets in the way. I would suggest giving a checkbox/option to use the opacity output of your substance material as the brush alpha. If there's some secret way of fixing this problem that I'm not aware of, someone let me know!
Issue 2 - No hotkeys for rotating your brush, and more importantly, no visual feedback that your brush has been rotated. This makes the entire process of stamping decals complete guesswork. You stamp it down, the angle is wrong, you move your cursor completely off your work in order to change the angle, then do another test, then tweak again. You can spend an insane amount of time fiddling with this and still not get perfect results. Adding hotkeys for brush rotation and giving realtime feedback when you do so would be amazing.
Fixing those two issues would make painter very usable for stamping decals, but I have some other suggestions that would take it even further.
Suggestion 1 - full substance material stencils. Essentially, this would allow you to make a substance with full material properties, and then when you use that as a stencil, it paints down all the material information from the substance material, rather than just using it as a mask. This could be accomplished with a checkbox/toggle option when you use a substance material as a stencil that says "use this stencil as a substance material" or something like that.
Suggestion 2 - This has probably been suggested before, but adding a zbrush style "drag-rect" stroke would be extremely nice for placing down decals and details. This brush style combined with the brush alpha fix mentioned above as well as the ability to use substance materials would make for a very user friendly fuss free experience.
Substance painter is definitely headed in the right direction, and with a few more tweaks, using painter + designer in tandem will be able to completely replace photoshop for me. Looking forward to seeing future updates. Thanks for the awesome software!
Thanks for the feedback!
Dragrect functionality is in our plans as well as correct visualization of the brush rotation.
There is something you can do to achieve you goal though: Use the projection tool ("3" on your keyboard). It allows you to use a substance material as a projected stencil and that's the easiest way to stamp a specific decal on an objectt for now.
Thanks for the feedback!
Dragrect functionality is in our plans as well as correct visualization of the brush rotation.
There is something you can do to achieve you goal though: Use the projection tool ("3" on your keyboard). It allows you to use a substance material as a projected stencil and that's the easiest way to stamp a specific decal on an object for now.
Oh! Projection mode works exactly like full material stencils, perfect! That will help a whole lot, thanks!
One quick suggestion (and maybe its possible already) would be to allow you to adjust the spacing of the tiling. If you're using a stencil/substance that has pixels close to the edges, it makes it a bit tough to not accidentally stencil in some of the adjacent tiles. It's pretty easy to fix afterward, but would just be a nice quality of life feature.
Another possible fix would be just a toggle to disable tiling on your stencil completely.
I could be doing this wrong, but when I turn on/off my material id's with my fill layer some of the id's won't turn on or off. I thought it might be related to the color of the mat id that substance uses. So I changed the colors to match the ones of my id mask and everything's ok. Is there a quicker way around this so that the colors substance assigns to my id's matches the ones in my id map already? As it stands I have to remember how many id's I have and drag the color picker over the tiny color map :poly142:
Here you can see the colors that are associated with the material id's by default in substance. When I turn on/off the material id's some of the materials aren't affected. I found it was because the colors loaded in substance's material id's don't match the specific colors of my id mask.
Here I changed the default material colors to match my map id's on my texture. The materials would then turn on/off.
The only issue with this is selection map is tiny so some of the colors are difficult to distinguish haha. I wasn't sure if I was missing something and making this harder on myself. Thanks for the quick reply Jeremie!
I'm not sure which build you have but there is now a much easier way to select your IDs!
With your mask selected, click on the effect button and choose Add Color Selection. You'll get a nice custom UI that allows you to pick colors directly on your mesh to create ID masks
Ohhhh im gonna have to update so hows this work if I already have my id mask made in another 3d program? I could be mistaken but this seems like it's more to create the mask from scratch?
Ohhhh im gonna have to update so hows this work if I already have my id mask made in another 3d program? I could be mistaken but this seems like it's more to create the mask from scratch?
No, the viewport will show your color map and you just sample which color you want to mask.
I have noticed that UE4 doesn't read roughness from green or blue channels if it was packed in Painter with standard UE4 packaging. If I plug in a separate map it's ok.
Not sure what I am doing wrong, but I cant get stencils to work in the latest version of Painter. I can set the stencil up fine but then when I go to paint noting is being masked out. Anyone have any clue what I could be doing wrong?
Jerc - On that note, it would be awesome to get a shader that was closer to what UE4 uses. I don't know what's involved with that, but the roughness values don't really relate to what UE4 wants to see so I can't use the painter viewport as a WYSIWYG editor. I have to accept that it won't match and just use experimentation to get a proper look in UE4.
For example, metal that looks kind of shiny in Painter is blindingly polished in UE4.
Replies
*directional lights in viewport
*adjustmentl layers for folders
*saving in psd preserving the masks
I really hope allegorithmic will put those 3 things in the next update
I'll look into the adjustment layers, I'm not sure what's the priority on that one.
Full PSD saving should come a bit later.
I've been playing around quite a lot with the backface culling option since it was suggested, and I'm still not able to get the behaviour I expect.
Using Alignment: Camera, Size Space: Object, and a six sided cylinder with backfacing culling on and an angle even a little below 90, I STILL get streaking -- the only change is that now the brush is applying the texture much more faintly.
If I go lower than 60ish, no texture is applied regardless of how I orient the camera.
I also notice that I can not turn off the pen pressure on brushes. I don't use a tablet, so I'm wondering if that may be causing brush not applying any texture when backface culling is on.
Right now for painting out seams, I'm finding I have to use Alignment: Camera, Size Space: Texture (to make sure the texture matches the size of any fill layers), ignore the backface culling, and then just mask out the streaking problem by hand using the UV alignment.
This is not super terrible for my workflow, but it does seem like an extra step compared to Mudbox or 3D Coat. On the flip side, the texture quality is generally much more sharp in crisp in Substance Painter than in Mudbox (by far, Mudbox gets blurry fast).
Further, on thin components, backface culling does nothing useful regardless of the settings. It still paints on both sides, or it doesn't paint at all. By "thin," I mean "the size of a human character's torso." If backface culling actually fixed THIS problem, I'd be very happy.
Wow, I was actually expecting this to still be a case of user error on my part. Heh.
Good to know it'll be fixed!
[Edit] Also, the brush tool seems noticably more laggy than it used to be. Every long stroke makes SP stutter a bit, and a red line appears briefly above the shelf (I guess a processing indicator?).
I have an i7 4770k, NVIDEA GeForce GTX 680 w/ 4 GB, and 16 GB system ram, that was more than enough to handle SP before on any quality setting, so I'm thinking something changed in the last update.
Here's something I just noticed -- nowhere in the UI does it tell you the name of the project you currently have opened, haha.
Doesn't say it in the window name, in the document settings, or in the viewport... it doesn't even put it as the file name when you select "Save as."
If I'm missing where this info is, let me know.
Also, is there a way to clear the content of a layer WITHOUT removing the mask? Often times I want to reuse the same mask, so I dupe a layer, but then I'm stuck using the erase tool instead of cntrl-A + DEL like I'm used to in Photoshop.
Does it happen with every brush you have ? Brushes with a substances require more computation than regular bitmap/uniform colors.
Indeed, it's planned. That's on the list of all the little things that should be done.
In you case, the best is to create a new layer, then copy the content of the mask (right-click on the original mask -> copy mask) and then paste it on the mask of the new layer (right click -> paste mask).
Yup, it happens with every brush, even if it's just a plain colour. Full substances are noticably more laggy of course.
What I've noticed is that it happens mainly when I have images in the "additional maps" slots. Especially when the Ambient Occlusion slot is filled.
With no additional map slots filled, I don't usually see any lag. With just a normal map, lag happens sometimes (and isn't too much a problem). With an AO slot filled, laggy strokes happen almost always.
This is at 2048x2048 (main image + all additional slots) and using medium quality settings. NVIDIA drivers are up to date.
Ah, okay! Thanks for the tip.
just 2 questions
*any plan to check in viewport the albedo map (and the others maps to export)? very useful when work with metals..
*alpha in viewport
thanks!
You can switch the displayed Channels with the Key 'C', or in the Viewer settings.
Alpha Channels are planned
Cheers,
~Tung
Also I think would be great to have an alternative workflow like albedo+ reflectance + glossyness. Infact at the moment is not possible to chance the reflectance manually, and everything is non-metal has 60,60,60 value and no way to change it manually.
thanks!
yes.
Only thing I wish I could see sooner is clone brush then this program will be my main squeeze.
Thanks again guys!
Also some suggestions:
What about a button to hide all shelves. Kind of like Photoshops expert mode. This way you can get everything out of the way real quick and focus just on painting.
Also another suggestion would be an Add Mesh to Project. This way I can work on an object and when I want to add something else into the scene i can just import that object instead of creating a new export file and collapsing my layers down.
You can add elements to your scene by using the Edit>Project Configuration menu. just add your new element to your original FBX in your 3d program and reimport it through this menu, there shouldn't be anything else to do.
Man.... :poly121: I knew it would be something simple. Thanks Jerc!
My mesh is separated by materials but I want to export everything out onto only 1 texture set and not multiple texture sets. How do I do this?
p.s second request: or be able to hide and show mesh object pieces on 1 mesh with 1 texture set.
thanks, it was pretty obvious.
1. Copy/Paste ability for substance effects, so I can paste similar effects into different layers or masks. (I don't think it exists so far, when I right-click the menus are grayed ouy)
2. Ability to change masks (say from bitmap ID to a white mask) without losing the effect I have tied to it. Is there a way to invert a black mask to white or vice versa as well?
3. A way to combine mat ID mask with black/white mask paint functions. (Not a huge deal, I have been assigning a bitmap ID mask to a group and then painting custom masks to individual contained layers).
Thanks!
If I wanted to use some of the nice mesh adaptive effects from Substance Designer, for example, "rock_weathering.sbs" or ""moss_weathering.sbs" in Substance Painter, how would I do that?
I don't see an sbsar file that I can import into SP.
You will have create an sbsar. (And to adapt the inputs/outputs)
We have some documentation about the specific nomenclature : http://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Creating+Substance+effects
We have neither of these two feature for the moment. The second one is most likely to be added first. I can't give you any date unfortunately.
Does exposing parameters work differently in Substance Painter?
As a test, I've published a copy of the moss weathering effect as an sbsar, with the identifiers correctly named, and while I can then use it in Sub Painter as an effect, it has no parameters exposed (even though they're clearly exposed in SD prior to publishing).
Additionally, the icon doesn't show up either, but that's a pretty minor thing.
For the icon that's normal, the icon is not saved in an sbsar. That's part of the data that are removed when cooking.
I've been trying various things to try and get the exposed parameters to appear in the publish dialogue or in Substance Painter, all without success. Doesn't seem to matter whether I'm using a default sbs or a totally fresh file with exposed parameters. Regardless of what's exposed, the only parameters that appear are "random seed," "pixel size," and "output size," and the only one that will show in Painter is "random seed."
I'm really hoping this is just a user error thing on my part.
Could workaround with a custom user channel.
Otherwise fantastic work
I've been digging into substance painter in an attempt to work it into our pipeline at work. The main functionality I'm looking for, is the ability to stamp decals/details based on substance packages.
The process i'm experimenting with involves models with many uv shells that are auto unwrapped/packed based on smoothing groups. A side effect of this is that your uv layouts tend to not be very human readable. This is where painter saves the day, or rather... where I want it to save the day.
The basic idea of it works - I can make a substance that has several decals with settings like wear and tear, normal details, choosing which decal you're going to stamp, etc etc. This part of the process works amazingly and does exactly what I want.
The process of actually stamping the decals however... is quite another story. I have two main gripes with the current process, which if fixed would increase the usability by quite a lot - however there's even more room for improvement.
Issue 1 - The checkerboard of doom. When no alpha is selected, the transparent pixels of your substance material are represented by a 100% opaque checkerboard. This completely gets in the way. I would suggest giving a checkbox/option to use the opacity output of your substance material as the brush alpha. If there's some secret way of fixing this problem that I'm not aware of, someone let me know!
Issue 2 - No hotkeys for rotating your brush, and more importantly, no visual feedback that your brush has been rotated. This makes the entire process of stamping decals complete guesswork. You stamp it down, the angle is wrong, you move your cursor completely off your work in order to change the angle, then do another test, then tweak again. You can spend an insane amount of time fiddling with this and still not get perfect results. Adding hotkeys for brush rotation and giving realtime feedback when you do so would be amazing.
Fixing those two issues would make painter very usable for stamping decals, but I have some other suggestions that would take it even further.
Suggestion 1 - full substance material stencils. Essentially, this would allow you to make a substance with full material properties, and then when you use that as a stencil, it paints down all the material information from the substance material, rather than just using it as a mask. This could be accomplished with a checkbox/toggle option when you use a substance material as a stencil that says "use this stencil as a substance material" or something like that.
Suggestion 2 - This has probably been suggested before, but adding a zbrush style "drag-rect" stroke would be extremely nice for placing down decals and details. This brush style combined with the brush alpha fix mentioned above as well as the ability to use substance materials would make for a very user friendly fuss free experience.
Substance painter is definitely headed in the right direction, and with a few more tweaks, using painter + designer in tandem will be able to completely replace photoshop for me. Looking forward to seeing future updates. Thanks for the awesome software!
Dragrect functionality is in our plans as well as correct visualization of the brush rotation.
There is something you can do to achieve you goal though: Use the projection tool ("3" on your keyboard). It allows you to use a substance material as a projected stencil and that's the easiest way to stamp a specific decal on an objectt for now.
Oh! Projection mode works exactly like full material stencils, perfect! That will help a whole lot, thanks!
One quick suggestion (and maybe its possible already) would be to allow you to adjust the spacing of the tiling. If you're using a stencil/substance that has pixels close to the edges, it makes it a bit tough to not accidentally stencil in some of the adjacent tiles. It's pretty easy to fix afterward, but would just be a nice quality of life feature.
Another possible fix would be just a toggle to disable tiling on your stencil completely.
@Chase: I'm not sure I get the problem exactly, would you be able to post a screenshot of the issue?
Here you can see the colors that are associated with the material id's by default in substance. When I turn on/off the material id's some of the materials aren't affected. I found it was because the colors loaded in substance's material id's don't match the specific colors of my id mask.
Here I changed the default material colors to match my map id's on my texture. The materials would then turn on/off.
The only issue with this is selection map is tiny so some of the colors are difficult to distinguish haha. I wasn't sure if I was missing something and making this harder on myself. Thanks for the quick reply Jeremie!
With your mask selected, click on the effect button and choose Add Color Selection. You'll get a nice custom UI that allows you to pick colors directly on your mesh to create ID masks
The id_selector effect is deprecated.
No, the viewport will show your color map and you just sample which color you want to mask.
@BPanting: Are you using stencils that came with Painter? The new 1.3 release that will be out on Wednesday may hopefully fix your issue.
I tried to make my own. I created a png with an alpha. Will that not work?
For example, metal that looks kind of shiny in Painter is blindingly polished in UE4.