Batch/renderfarm texture exporting - Substance Painter
polycounter lvl 4
Hey everyone.
So at the VFX studio I work at we are doing a "post mortem" after completing a 2 year project, during that time my work was mostly texture work. Now looking back one of the biggest time thief was exporting textures from Substance Painter locally on the machine and then moving them to the server, over 2 years that added up to a lot. So now we are looking for ways to update the texturing pipeline.
I'm familiar with the automation toolkit that can be used with designer although I have not used it yet, texturing tasks that can be done in designer will be done there in the future with use of the automation toolkit.
So now I'm looking for ways to achieve something similar with Painter so all texture exports can be done on the render farm, after looking into it a bit I can't find any clear public documentation of anyone doing it. I've seen people asking on their forum for advice but mostly posts that are a few years old, on one of the threads a staff member says there is no command line tool in Painter like in Designer.
If anyone has information that could help with this I would appreciate it! To recap, I would like to batch export from painter on our render farm. Being able to use batch tools like sbsbaker, sbscooker etc. (the batch tools from automation toolkit) would also be great!
So at the VFX studio I work at we are doing a "post mortem" after completing a 2 year project, during that time my work was mostly texture work. Now looking back one of the biggest time thief was exporting textures from Substance Painter locally on the machine and then moving them to the server, over 2 years that added up to a lot. So now we are looking for ways to update the texturing pipeline.
I'm familiar with the automation toolkit that can be used with designer although I have not used it yet, texturing tasks that can be done in designer will be done there in the future with use of the automation toolkit.
So now I'm looking for ways to achieve something similar with Painter so all texture exports can be done on the render farm, after looking into it a bit I can't find any clear public documentation of anyone doing it. I've seen people asking on their forum for advice but mostly posts that are a few years old, on one of the threads a staff member says there is no command line tool in Painter like in Designer.
If anyone has information that could help with this I would appreciate it! To recap, I would like to batch export from painter on our render farm. Being able to use batch tools like sbsbaker, sbscooker etc. (the batch tools from automation toolkit) would also be great!
Replies
It's possible to launch painter and run a texture export from a python script that pokes it through a websocket and then process output using the automation toolkit - I've done it.
Bad news. It's a little bit hacky.
I don't have the documentation to hand but if you contact allegorithmic directly (or do some googling) you'll find the necessaries fairly quickly.
It's a bit limited - you can't fire off a plugin once painter has started/ loaded a file for example but if all you want to do is update resources and an export it works fine.