Another thing - If I'm editing multiple graphs at the same time and want to keep looking at the same output, I need to nest one inside the other and right click "Open Reference". If I'm switching between them via the explorer window the output clears. Is this the intended behavior?
So I finished my throne room entry last night/this morning, and I had been doing a lot of baking of maps in substance designer and have some feature requests about that stuff.
Adding the match by mesh name option was really cool but I think some more options for this kind of workflow could be added.
Working in zbrush with high res subtools it can be a pain to keep all the mesh names in line especially since when you save a tool, it renames the selected subtool whatever you save. So for example the helmet in your soldier01 file gets named soldier01 every time you save your zbrush tool, and you have to rename it when you go to export your high poly for baking.
In this situation I would think also matching by filename would come in handy, so even ignoring zbrush, if you named something wrong you could just rename the file instead of jumping into whatever dcc app and exporting all over. This would also have the benefit of being able to bake a certain group of high poly meshes to a low poly, like a walkie talkie that consists of many high poly pieces, but 1 low poly mesh while still allowing to bake the walkie talkie pouch and other things at the same time without intersections.
Also possibly having a delimiter system for sub meshes would also be useful in cases like the above so like walkie-body_high, walkie-antenna_high and walkie-knob_high, would all bake to walkie_low.
I also wondered if there could be a way to bake multiple low poly files at the same time, my work around right now is to just save the meshes into a single low poly file. Aside from having multiple low poly files, another "matching" interface that might work, is having some sort of list associated with each low poly mesh, or with a certain low poly selected, you could make corresponding high poly meshes visible.
On another side to baking, I had been doing a lot of baking transferred textures while making foliage. Basically I would create a base pattern in designer, which I would then map to my high poly leaf which I could move UVs around for variations etc... Then I would load up the high poly and bake both the base color and roughness (which is all I was outputting at the time). Which I would then load into another graph where I had baked normal, height, thickness etc... I figured if I needed to change the leaf base, I could do that and push it through fairly easily.
However, I found myself wanting to be able to bake out a graph itself instead of having to load each map as a separate transferred texture bake. Also there is a feature in xNormal called "Base Texture is a Tangent Space Normal Map" which won't just bake a 1:1 mapping of where each pixel is, but sort of act as a poor man's high poly (not sure how to explain it).
Lastly with the texture transfer stuff, I thought being able to load multiple maps would be useful for creating tree branches. You have the leaf material, and then the bark material, probably having some sort of options for outputting material masks too.
Whew that was a lot, a lot of this stuff only came up as I started to use Substance designer a lot more, and I'm loving it. Obviously there might very well be many technical reasons why these suggestions aren't implemented but I hope the feedback is useful.
How can I delete dependencies that are no longer used in a package? I have a one-graph package that I'm 100% certain that's not using anything else from other packages but at a certain point I had some bitmaps dropped there. Even after getting rid of the resources they still try to load up upon opening the graph, and trying to open the dependency manager makes SD crash. How to deal with this?
The only way I can think of would be rebuilding the graph from scratch but that would be a lot of work...
When you right click on your package and click on Dependencies, what do you get?
The whole app freezes for a second and crashes It doesn't show anything up on the dependencies window, maybe it doesn't have time to do so before the crash. dunno...
@Bruno We are aware of a crash with the dependency manager when a package contains cycled dependencies. It's been fixed but it won't be available until the next minor update.
A way to workaround the problem, and clean the dependencies, is to open the .sbs in a text editor. This is quite dangerous, you can contact me directly so I can help you doing that.
So it seems like Substance Designer 5 never remembers which folder I export my outputs to now.
If I export, I have to choose the folder and file type (which is pretty much how it's always behaved the first export). But if I close SD and open it the next day, I have to do that all over again if I want to export that graph again. This didn't always happen; before it would always remember the last folder/file type.
This is kiiind of a PITA when you're making small changes to graphs from the previous day.
So it seems like Substance Designer 5 never remembers which folder I export my outputs to now.
If I export, I have to choose the folder and file type (which is pretty much how it's always behaved the first export). But if I close SD and open it the next day, I have to do that all over again if I want to export that graph again. This didn't always happen; before it would always remember the last folder/file type.
This is kiiind of a PITA when you're making small changes to graphs from the previous day.
During next week, probably Tuesday. Meanwhile you can create an account on our website (if you don't have already one), link your steam account with it and get an access to the standalone version which is already available in 5.0.3.
I'm getting an error when trying to load substances into Max 15, I can load the substances that come with it, but not my own.
The error message is 'Failed to load substance'
Is this because of the PBR set up isn't compatible?
Do you use SD5 or an earlier version?
This can be due to the fact you use new engine features from SD5; to check the nodes that use new features you can click on:
"Tools=>Preferences=>Projects" and set the "Compatibility Mode" to Substance Engine v4, this way you can get a visual feedback of the nodes that use new features.
As our new engine is more recent than the one embedded in 3dsMax 2015, it can cause error if you use new functionalities in your sbsar files.
Hi guys!
Me and my friend have found a possible bug with painter`s color picker.
It simply picks wrong diffuse (base) color.
I`ve taken sample model Oceanus to demonstrate.
To replicate the bug at the extreme do the following:
1) Find a place with relatively plain color
2) Pick the color with color picker (P) and paint over with big brush
3) Pick from the same painted area and paint over it again
4) Repeat picking and painting over 10-15 times
You get a completely burned color, the more you pick and paint, the worse it gets.
We`ve been able to replicate this issue on 3 different PC, so I guess its not hardware-dependant.
When a Bake:
Normal Map from Mesh,
Ambient Occlusion Map from Mesh,
Color Map from Mesh,
The Baker load 3 time the high poly mesh...
Itsn't possible to load the high poly mesh once time in RAM ? It will save time (it's the more time consuming action of the baking).
Thanks !
Do you use SD5 or an earlier version?
This can be due to the fact you use new engine features from SD5; to check the nodes that use new features you can click on:
"Tools=>Preferences=>Projects" and set the "Compatibility Mode" to Substance Engine v4, this way you can get a visual feedback of the nodes that use new features.
As our new engine is more recent than the one embedded in 3dsMax 2015, it can cause error if you use new functionalities in your sbsar files.
Currently trying to import something from SD5 into UE4 and this may just be the problem. The import fails everytime but works fine with my SD4 substances. Any alternatives until a fix comes out?
just a repeat on what Swizzle asked, im trying out the same tutorial .
what is the intended changes with the edge detect node and is their a way to make it behave as it did in 5.0.0?
i rerouted the node in designer and got my desired result but when i put my graph in player it obviously doesn't work.
I've just installed latest version of SD, but nothing happened when I clicked the program. I didn't have the problem with previous release. I'm using win7-64. Am I missing something?
Edit : After updated some windows fixes, it ran just fine.
Solid. Thanks! One last thing, I have a white noise in my substance that always give me an error when I send it to substance player, no matter what size I set it to.
Back End...
Size out of bounds:
Size: 4096x4096
From Graph: pkg://white_noise?dependency=1146345729
I'm trying to export the alpha channel in Painter to store the transparency in the Albedo map. This is needed in Marmoset. But the alpha always appears inverted making the things that should be opaque transparent.
This is also the case if I import the alpha it as a map alone. Not sure what settings I need to change to avoid this. The opacity looks ok in the 3d display window of Painter.
Also only appears as a channel in certain formats, for example TGA. In others only appears as integrated transparency without alpha, as TIF. In this case the alpha can't be inverted in Photoshop as simply the information of that area is missing. I rather prefer TIF as TGA supports less options.
I'm trying to export the alpha channel in Painter to store the transparency in the Albedo map. This is needed in Marmoset. But the alpha always appears inverted making the things that should be opaque transparent.
This is also the case if I import the alpha it as a map alone. Not sure what settings I need to change to avoid this. The opacity looks ok in the 3d display window of Painter.
Also only appears as a channel in certain formats, for example TGA. In others only appears as integrated transparency without alpha, as TIF. In this case the alpha can't be inverted in Photoshop as simply the information of that area is missing. I rather prefer TIF as TGA supports less options.
Are you using a Transmissive channel or opacity channel in your project ? There are different and should now be confused in Substance Painter. With an opacity map, white would be opaque while black would be invisible.
You can extract the transparency of a texture in Substance Designer as a regular alpha channel. You can do it too in Photoshop (via Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency).
OK, so ... there's a weird thing where if I tell a fill layer to "Replace" as it's blending mode, it looks like it does in the channel view but in the material view it's still blending. Like, this ...
Now, the part that's showing through is from the normal map that substance painter baked for me. Can you not do a "Replace" operation against the base normal map?
Man, I hope that's understandable ... Let me know what I can clarify.
You can do a replace but you'll have to add a Normal channel to your document, and activate it in your brush when you paint.
The height channel can't override the initial normal map because the conversion to normal is done once for the whole stack. Height can "replace" height info that was painted on the layers below but not the normal map itself.
I'm using opacity. When painting I use black for transparency. But when I do the export appears inverted. I have tried again with a project from scratch and testing the two options for the opacity (a channel and gray channel) in a black and white PNG. I have used also the alpha blending shader (that works great) and the opacity channel is using the default L8.
Are you using a Transmissive channel or opacity channel in your project ? There are different and should now be confused in Substance Painter. With an opacity map, white would be opaque while black would be invisible.
You can extract the transparency of a texture in Substance Designer as a regular alpha channel. You can do it too in Photoshop (via Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency).[/QUOTE]
I added a Normal channel and I added a fill layer, set to "Replace" on the Normal channel and let it fill with "0.5,0.5,0.0" and it's still not wiping out the normal info.
The layer is masked, if that matters, so I can paint in where I want the replacement happening...
My bad, you'll have to create a fill layer at the bottom of your layer stack, activate only the normal map channel and apply your base normal map to it with a replace blending mode first to override the one set up in your additional maps.
Only then you'll be able to replace parts of this normal maps in your other layers.
OK, I tried that and there's still sadness. Here's shots of the various channels ... it looks like I AM overriding the normal channel now but it's still lighting the model as if that area isn't blanked out.
And the export to TGA has the detail in it ... it's not masked out.
My bad x2, you have to remove the normal map from the additional maps slots too as it is NOT overridden by the fill layer.
Definitely not ideal and we need to find a way to make this work better as it even confuses me
After the latest Substance Painter update, when I start it once and then close it normally, Steam still thinks it's running (shows up in friends, etc). The main program is definitely NOT running however according to process explorer.
It won't let me start it back up again ("failed to start (app is already running)"), though I can still start other programs and games. However it keeps showing Substance Painter as the active app in Steam Friends and so on.
Substance Painter itself doesn't appear to be having any problems, so it looks like some sort of Steam integration problem.
[Edit] Actually, looks like crashwatcher.exe is getting orphaned when Painter closes, and that's messing with steam. If I end process on crashwatcher, I can restart Painter no problems.
It seems to be consistently making crashwatcher.exe orphaned every time I close Substance Painter. Just tried it again a moment ago.
Yesterday was the first time I'd use SP since it'd updated to the new version. Before this had never happened. Now it is consistently happening. Each time, starting, using, closing, orphaned crashwatcher.exe.
I've restarted both steam and the computer since, and it still happens.
Sorry if this was suggested already, I was too lazy to go over all of the pages
Is it possible to make navigation like Zbrush? What I mean is scrolling menus up and down with right click hold and drag/middle mouse click and drag? I find it really hard to work with a pen and laptop where the screen space is limited
I'd like a bright coloured outline (yellow, red, whatever) around the node that is currently computing. Or some indication, so for slower graphs, I can watch as it works its way through the nodes.
When I need to create larger images (4096x4096 terrain, for example), I normally work at a lower resolution (2048x2048 or 1024x1024) since working at the higher resolution is generally too slow to see results quickly, then I upscale it when I'm ready to export the larger finished images.
As the graph calculates, I often see several nodes "stuck" at some weird inbetween size (like 4096x2048 ), and I'd really like to get a sense of progress instead of alt-tabbing out or watching an unmoving graph.
Feature request Substance Painter:
Let us import SVG files for use as ID maps. Substance Designer bakes out ID maps as SVGs (which can't be opened in Photoshop by default), yet Substance Painter can't import SVGs and requires a high poly map to bake them.
Feel like this is a fairly important feature lacking since the programs are supposed to have some base interchangability.
The latest build of Substance Painter, 1.3.4, is unusably slow in the viewport. I literally can not even put my mouse over the viewport without it grinding to a halt.
It's only using 15% max (usually around 10-12%) of my processing, and doesn't appear to be grabbing tons of memory. But anything that requires the viewport to render (moving the mouse over it, changing the panarama opacity, etc) and the whole thing just stops for several seconds.
Windows 7, 16 GB memory, Nvidia GeForce 680GTX w/ 4 GB. Graphics drivers up to date.
Actually more than just the viewport is ridiculously slow now. It takes several seconds to remove blank channels, even if the mesh is a simple cube.
I'd like a bright coloured outline (yellow, red, whatever) around the node that is currently computing. Or some indication, so for slower graphs, I can watch as it works its way through the nodes.
This would be great!
Found one small thing - On the Stripes pattern, setting the "Shift" to a negative value made my whole computer freeze.
Replies
Adding the match by mesh name option was really cool but I think some more options for this kind of workflow could be added.
Working in zbrush with high res subtools it can be a pain to keep all the mesh names in line especially since when you save a tool, it renames the selected subtool whatever you save. So for example the helmet in your soldier01 file gets named soldier01 every time you save your zbrush tool, and you have to rename it when you go to export your high poly for baking.
In this situation I would think also matching by filename would come in handy, so even ignoring zbrush, if you named something wrong you could just rename the file instead of jumping into whatever dcc app and exporting all over. This would also have the benefit of being able to bake a certain group of high poly meshes to a low poly, like a walkie talkie that consists of many high poly pieces, but 1 low poly mesh while still allowing to bake the walkie talkie pouch and other things at the same time without intersections.
Also possibly having a delimiter system for sub meshes would also be useful in cases like the above so like walkie-body_high, walkie-antenna_high and walkie-knob_high, would all bake to walkie_low.
I also wondered if there could be a way to bake multiple low poly files at the same time, my work around right now is to just save the meshes into a single low poly file. Aside from having multiple low poly files, another "matching" interface that might work, is having some sort of list associated with each low poly mesh, or with a certain low poly selected, you could make corresponding high poly meshes visible.
On another side to baking, I had been doing a lot of baking transferred textures while making foliage. Basically I would create a base pattern in designer, which I would then map to my high poly leaf which I could move UVs around for variations etc... Then I would load up the high poly and bake both the base color and roughness (which is all I was outputting at the time). Which I would then load into another graph where I had baked normal, height, thickness etc... I figured if I needed to change the leaf base, I could do that and push it through fairly easily.
However, I found myself wanting to be able to bake out a graph itself instead of having to load each map as a separate transferred texture bake. Also there is a feature in xNormal called "Base Texture is a Tangent Space Normal Map" which won't just bake a 1:1 mapping of where each pixel is, but sort of act as a poor man's high poly (not sure how to explain it).
Lastly with the texture transfer stuff, I thought being able to load multiple maps would be useful for creating tree branches. You have the leaf material, and then the bark material, probably having some sort of options for outputting material masks too.
Whew that was a lot, a lot of this stuff only came up as I started to use Substance designer a lot more, and I'm loving it. Obviously there might very well be many technical reasons why these suggestions aren't implemented but I hope the feedback is useful.
How can I delete dependencies that are no longer used in a package? I have a one-graph package that I'm 100% certain that's not using anything else from other packages but at a certain point I had some bitmaps dropped there. Even after getting rid of the resources they still try to load up upon opening the graph, and trying to open the dependency manager makes SD crash. How to deal with this?
The only way I can think of would be rebuilding the graph from scratch but that would be a lot of work...
@m4dcow Thanks for the feedback, there are indeed still a lot of stuff we can do to improve the baking!
The whole app freezes for a second and crashes
A way to workaround the problem, and clean the dependencies, is to open the .sbs in a text editor. This is quite dangerous, you can contact me directly so I can help you doing that.
If I export, I have to choose the folder and file type (which is pretty much how it's always behaved the first export). But if I close SD and open it the next day, I have to do that all over again if I want to export that graph again. This didn't always happen; before it would always remember the last folder/file type.
This is kiiind of a PITA when you're making small changes to graphs from the previous day.
Only started happening with 5.0.2
Painter doesn't have any missing parts:
Designer does:
OBJ is here, export from Modo - https://yadi.sk/d/P9WQYRUnfkLLN
Awesome. Will the 5.0.3 update be pushed to steam soon?
The error message is 'Failed to load substance'
Is this because of the PBR set up isn't compatible?
Do you use SD5 or an earlier version?
This can be due to the fact you use new engine features from SD5; to check the nodes that use new features you can click on:
"Tools=>Preferences=>Projects" and set the "Compatibility Mode" to Substance Engine v4, this way you can get a visual feedback of the nodes that use new features.
As our new engine is more recent than the one embedded in 3dsMax 2015, it can cause error if you use new functionalities in your sbsar files.
Thanks for the fast reply.
Feature request: Would it be possible to edit common parameters of multiple nodes at once?
Me and my friend have found a possible bug with painter`s color picker.
It simply picks wrong diffuse (base) color.
I`ve taken sample model Oceanus to demonstrate.
To replicate the bug at the extreme do the following:
1) Find a place with relatively plain color
2) Pick the color with color picker (P) and paint over with big brush
3) Pick from the same painted area and paint over it again
4) Repeat picking and painting over 10-15 times
You get a completely burned color, the more you pick and paint, the worse it gets.
We`ve been able to replicate this issue on 3 different PC, so I guess its not hardware-dependant.
Normal Map from Mesh,
Ambient Occlusion Map from Mesh,
Color Map from Mesh,
The Baker load 3 time the high poly mesh...
Itsn't possible to load the high poly mesh once time in RAM ? It will save time (it's the more time consuming action of the baking).
Thanks !
Currently trying to import something from SD5 into UE4 and this may just be the problem. The import fails everytime but works fine with my SD4 substances. Any alternatives until a fix comes out?
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?65857-Substance-Plugin-4-7-3-7-Released&highlight=substance
what is the intended changes with the edge detect node and is their a way to make it behave as it did in 5.0.0?
i rerouted the node in designer and got my desired result but when i put my graph in player it obviously doesn't work.
Edit : After updated some windows fixes, it ran just fine.
Solid. Thanks! One last thing, I have a white noise in my substance that always give me an error when I send it to substance player, no matter what size I set it to.
[ame="
I find that when I pipe in the source input I lose any function from the Max Distance slider.
Seems pretty simplistic, could this be a bug? Thanks!
This is just a warning, but if you don't want to see it, just go to Option / Set Size limit / 4096
This is also the case if I import the alpha it as a map alone. Not sure what settings I need to change to avoid this. The opacity looks ok in the 3d display window of Painter.
Also only appears as a channel in certain formats, for example TGA. In others only appears as integrated transparency without alpha, as TIF. In this case the alpha can't be inverted in Photoshop as simply the information of that area is missing. I rather prefer TIF as TGA supports less options.
You don't have exactly the same parameters in the properties of your node.
Try switching the "Combine Source/Distance" setting to "Only Source".
Are you using a Transmissive channel or opacity channel in your project ? There are different and should now be confused in Substance Painter. With an opacity map, white would be opaque while black would be invisible.
You can extract the transparency of a texture in Substance Designer as a regular alpha channel. You can do it too in Photoshop (via Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency).
Now, the part that's showing through is from the normal map that substance painter baked for me. Can you not do a "Replace" operation against the base normal map?
Man, I hope that's understandable ... Let me know what I can clarify.
The height channel can't override the initial normal map because the conversion to normal is done once for the whole stack. Height can "replace" height info that was painted on the layers below but not the normal map itself.
Are you using a Transmissive channel or opacity channel in your project ? There are different and should now be confused in Substance Painter. With an opacity map, white would be opaque while black would be invisible.
You can extract the transparency of a texture in Substance Designer as a regular alpha channel. You can do it too in Photoshop (via Layer > Layer Mask > From Transparency).[/QUOTE]
The layer is masked, if that matters, so I can paint in where I want the replacement happening...
Is that all I need to do?
Only then you'll be able to replace parts of this normal maps in your other layers.
And the export to TGA has the detail in it ... it's not masked out.
Definitely not ideal and we need to find a way to make this work better as it even confuses me
Shift + RMB to rotate HDR instead of having to go into the tools to rotate.
It won't let me start it back up again ("failed to start (app is already running)"), though I can still start other programs and games. However it keeps showing Substance Painter as the active app in Steam Friends and so on.
Substance Painter itself doesn't appear to be having any problems, so it looks like some sort of Steam integration problem.
[Edit] Actually, looks like crashwatcher.exe is getting orphaned when Painter closes, and that's messing with steam. If I end process on crashwatcher, I can restart Painter no problems.
Yesterday was the first time I'd use SP since it'd updated to the new version. Before this had never happened. Now it is consistently happening. Each time, starting, using, closing, orphaned crashwatcher.exe.
I've restarted both steam and the computer since, and it still happens.
Is it possible to make navigation like Zbrush? What I mean is scrolling menus up and down with right click hold and drag/middle mouse click and drag? I find it really hard to work with a pen and laptop where the screen space is limited
[ame]
I'd like a bright coloured outline (yellow, red, whatever) around the node that is currently computing. Or some indication, so for slower graphs, I can watch as it works its way through the nodes.
When I need to create larger images (4096x4096 terrain, for example), I normally work at a lower resolution (2048x2048 or 1024x1024) since working at the higher resolution is generally too slow to see results quickly, then I upscale it when I'm ready to export the larger finished images.
As the graph calculates, I often see several nodes "stuck" at some weird inbetween size (like 4096x2048 ), and I'd really like to get a sense of progress instead of alt-tabbing out or watching an unmoving graph.
Feature request Substance Painter:
Let us import SVG files for use as ID maps. Substance Designer bakes out ID maps as SVGs (which can't be opened in Photoshop by default), yet Substance Painter can't import SVGs and requires a high poly map to bake them.
Feel like this is a fairly important feature lacking since the programs are supposed to have some base interchangability.
The latest build of Substance Painter, 1.3.4, is unusably slow in the viewport. I literally can not even put my mouse over the viewport without it grinding to a halt.
It's only using 15% max (usually around 10-12%) of my processing, and doesn't appear to be grabbing tons of memory. But anything that requires the viewport to render (moving the mouse over it, changing the panarama opacity, etc) and the whole thing just stops for several seconds.
Windows 7, 16 GB memory, Nvidia GeForce 680GTX w/ 4 GB. Graphics drivers up to date.
Actually more than just the viewport is ridiculously slow now. It takes several seconds to remove blank channels, even if the mesh is a simple cube.
This would be great!
Found one small thing - On the Stripes pattern, setting the "Shift" to a negative value made my whole computer freeze.