HELP! School isn't teaching me this!
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Hey guys and gals,
Okay, so I'm making a prop... It's a tree on a rock. My mind is just in a mess trying to juggle all the aspects of finishing this. I have a few questions for anyone kind and knowledgeable enough.
So, I'd like the tree and rock to be separate meshes so that when I bring into Substance Painter I can match the names for baking purposes. How do I bring both the tree and the rock into painter and bake the high poly versions of both onto them? If I combine the objects so that I have a high poly treeRock and a low poly treeRock, I can't match the names because it's just one mesh. So to avoid artifacts (because the tree sits right on the rock) I need to have them as separate meshes so I can match the tree_low to the tree_high, and the rock_low to the rock_high.
I have the low rock and low tree UV'd out on one 0-1 space. In the end, it all has to be just one object. But my question stands how do I go about using two meshes in substance at first for baking? I only know how to get one mesh in at a time. And once I do get both meshes in and texture them, how do I go about having just one set of textures when it's all said and done. Any workflow that helps me would be appreciated.
Okay, so I'm making a prop... It's a tree on a rock. My mind is just in a mess trying to juggle all the aspects of finishing this. I have a few questions for anyone kind and knowledgeable enough.
So, I'd like the tree and rock to be separate meshes so that when I bring into Substance Painter I can match the names for baking purposes. How do I bring both the tree and the rock into painter and bake the high poly versions of both onto them? If I combine the objects so that I have a high poly treeRock and a low poly treeRock, I can't match the names because it's just one mesh. So to avoid artifacts (because the tree sits right on the rock) I need to have them as separate meshes so I can match the tree_low to the tree_high, and the rock_low to the rock_high.
I have the low rock and low tree UV'd out on one 0-1 space. In the end, it all has to be just one object. But my question stands how do I go about using two meshes in substance at first for baking? I only know how to get one mesh in at a time. And once I do get both meshes in and texture them, how do I go about having just one set of textures when it's all said and done. Any workflow that helps me would be appreciated.
Replies
I often have to explode objects to work on them in painter as it's too hard to work on a lot of overlapping geometry - and it doesn't bake normals and AO properly.
So, you can export each thing as a separate object, and bake it. Then you get your baked maps. Then you can export the objects together as a single piece and take that into painter, along with your two maps. You can merge those two maps together in painter, or in photoshop. Just make a fill layer and mask off the overlap. easy peasy. Just try to realize that you can make as many different variations of your object as you want. It's not a real life sculpture -- its just data on a computer. You can split it up however you see fit, merge things back together a million different ways... a little experimentation goes a long way.
Inside Painter, you have different ways to separate your objects for ease of working. ID maps, mask by UV groups, mask by mesh objects, mask by material groups.... it just takes time and experience to learn all the different ways. The way to learn that gives the best memory retention is to go forward with your work until you hit a point where you think, "man, it would be nice to be able to such and such a certain way." Then you google that, and turns out there is exactly a tool or workflow for this idea you had.
So, just keep going, make mistakes, reset, and trust your future self, dont worry about him.