how to setup mesh before substance painter

alexworx

Hi All,

I am newbie to substance painter and I am really enjoying working with the demo version. My question is related to getting my meshes ready before I bring them into substance.

I will say that my typical workflow is a combination of 3ds max/vray and or 3ds max/UE4. Depends on the project. Now I am trying to get Substance Painter in that workflow.

With that said what is the best way to setup my meshes in max? For example, I am modeling out a old vintage suit case. Is it better to create the parts individually... ie the handle, buckles and overall suitcase. Apply a basic material to each part, Unwrap them individually, then attach them into one mesh and repack the UVW so there is no overlap. 

Is this the most efficient way of doing this or is there a better way? 

Also if I wanted a high and low res mesh do I just clone my mesh and add a turbosmooth to the clone mesh before I export?

Thanks for the help

Alex

Alex_J

Substance Painter has many options to fit the workflow you need. Material ID assignments get turned into "texture sets" which will be how the final textures get output. 

Within texture sets, you can isolate parts of your mesh a number of ways. By UV shells, by individual quads or tri's, by painting a mask, by using external images like grunge textures or color ID maps...

so the question is how will you organize your materials in the final render engine? If it's for a game obviously you are thinking about efficiency and performance, so something like a suitcase would probably belong to one material -- probably within a larger atlas of textures, right? In that case, just unwrap your suitcase, pack it into 0-1 space neatly and assign the entire mesh the same material ID.

alexworx

That makes sense. I understand what your saying. Thank you.