Substance Designer for multiple similar buildings?
polycounter lvl 11
Hi! I'm new to Designer, and trying to integrate it in my workflow for texturing buildings. The buildings have unique UVs and textures (so they are not modular really), but have some overlaps for more optimized UV space and texel density, and generally are similar (hangars, office buildings and so on).
Firstly I thought to use Designer only for creating base textures and then texturing every asset in Painter. But maybe it would be much faster in a long distance, if I'll use only Designer?
I won't using any high-poly meshes for normal maps, and the geometry is pretty simple. Windows, doors - all of it is using only normal map (which I'll create in Designer), no additional extrudes or bevels. Generally all of the buildings will consist of two or three materials - concrete/metal walls, metal roofs. Plus windows and doors and some unique elements (#1, #3)
So, the first question:
How would you make a mask for this elements? By adding some temporary loops and assign a different color, or just edit an SVG mask in Designer? Which way you think is faster?
The second question:
For example I have a simple window substance (#2), I use a material transform node and just scale and move it on a right place, and then connect it to a multi-material blend. If I need a second window - I duplicate material transform node, use some blends nodes and my PC is starts to slow down.
So, Is there a way to automatically scatter my substance in a specific places on a texture? For example, I create some squares and rectangles in SVG with identical color, move it in a right place, and my window substance somehow automatically duplicates and fill every rectangle?
Or maybe there is a much more easy way to place and copy them?
And if you guys have some links for good tutorials about using Designer in a such way, I would be very grateful.
Oh, and the third one, not so important:
In Designer 4 I could move light in 3d view with shift+LMB and scale it with shift-RMB. For some reason it doesn't work in Designer 5, however now I can rotate the environment. Is this feature is disabled in 5, or it just uses another hotkeys?
Thanks!
Firstly I thought to use Designer only for creating base textures and then texturing every asset in Painter. But maybe it would be much faster in a long distance, if I'll use only Designer?
I won't using any high-poly meshes for normal maps, and the geometry is pretty simple. Windows, doors - all of it is using only normal map (which I'll create in Designer), no additional extrudes or bevels. Generally all of the buildings will consist of two or three materials - concrete/metal walls, metal roofs. Plus windows and doors and some unique elements (#1, #3)
So, the first question:
How would you make a mask for this elements? By adding some temporary loops and assign a different color, or just edit an SVG mask in Designer? Which way you think is faster?
The second question:
For example I have a simple window substance (#2), I use a material transform node and just scale and move it on a right place, and then connect it to a multi-material blend. If I need a second window - I duplicate material transform node, use some blends nodes and my PC is starts to slow down.
So, Is there a way to automatically scatter my substance in a specific places on a texture? For example, I create some squares and rectangles in SVG with identical color, move it in a right place, and my window substance somehow automatically duplicates and fill every rectangle?
Or maybe there is a much more easy way to place and copy them?
And if you guys have some links for good tutorials about using Designer in a such way, I would be very grateful.
Oh, and the third one, not so important:
In Designer 4 I could move light in 3d view with shift+LMB and scale it with shift-RMB. For some reason it doesn't work in Designer 5, however now I can rotate the environment. Is this feature is disabled in 5, or it just uses another hotkeys?
Thanks!
Replies
In the long run it's probably indeed will be faster to mass-produce assets using Designer only. Painter is great too and it has smart materials/smart masks, but Designer is much more flexible. In time you'll have a number of graphs and useful graph snippets that will allow you to establish some kind of workflow and produce materials much faster, especially for similar objects. You still can use Painter ocasionally if needed to add a finishing touch for more complex assets.
In SD5 you still can use Shift + LMB/RMB to rotate and dolly point light. Probably you just need to enable it through the Light menu in 3D viewport - they're disabled by default.
For your questions:
1) If I'm not mistaken you're talking here of Material ID map that will allow you to pick masks based on mesh material color, and that means some baking. Depending on how you'll handle it, it can go both ways - SVG mask may be faster to create individually, but for a bunch of masks it may be easier to just place some polygons with different materials assigned to them and do a bake. You probably don't even need to cut in some loops - just use some template geometry with proper scale to move around over the walls in your scene, they will mark locations for you doors and windows on MatID map.
2) Seems like some advanced stuff. It may be possible to automatically scatter some nodes to specific places, but I'm not aware of such method yet. It may be worthy to look for some ways to optimize your current approach, so you'll suffer less from decreasing performance. There's a lot of options here. For example, you can try to check against Performance Guidlanes, looking to use less computations-expensive nodes, decrease resolution for some portions of the graph, and so on. Not to forget that getting a more powerful PC may be a part of the solution.
Alternatively, if it's an option, you can try to look for different approach for texturing you objects — instead of placing doors and windows into the same texture with walls and the roof, you can have them in a separate material. Windows and doors will be decals then, and it will be much easier to place and texture them using some kind of texture atlas.
As for the tutorials, there's a bunch of tutorials for creating materials, but none to my knowledge that describes a pipeline like in your post above. Hope that someone with more relevent experience will jump in with something to add. Also you should try your luck with this questions on Allegorithmic's forums — there may be some technical artists that will see your topic that may provide some additional tips on this.