Substance, 3dsmax and unity for games, unwrap to texture workflow?

Chubbs

Hey all,

I'm in need of a little guidance when using 3ds and substances for a unwrap to texture workflow.

The end goal is to have a library of substances which the team can reference and unwrap models against. This library will also be reference inside Unity. Currently each substance/material has a manual overhead setting up and naming correctly, it's name is not auto generated from the substance name with each map being incrementally assigned a number.

map#123
map#124 etc.......

This lack of auto naming makes it more difficult when choosing a texture and uv unwrapping against it.
  
The manual renaming is easy enough but it'll become extremely time consuming over the course of the project.

Is it possible to automate this set up and if so could some point me in the right direction in 3ds? I'd assume max script but having never used it I feel a wee bit lost. 

The 3ds Vray plugin looks like it does a pretty good job of auto setting materials but we don't use Vray in the studio so we're unable to use that.

Also any thoughts on a 3dsmax substance library viewer would be much appreciated.

Thanks  

poopipe

Creating a material and populating it with maps in maxscript isn't hard, it is a bit cryptic in there though.  You'll need to look into material delegates if you're dealing with a directX/Shader fx material. 
My approach is to Base material names on texture names - that way you can rely on default substance naming conventions for everything and it minimises Ballache. 

The hard bit is sensitively  avoiding duplication of materials by checking the scene etc.  But tbh I wouldn't bother (certainly didn't for the one I wrote at work for maya) 

Chubbs

Thanks for your thoughts, I'll keep this in mind when learning max script.