How to have multiple texture sets on the same mesh?
I understand Substance Painter creates texture sets automatically for each Material ID in my .fbx file. But my use case is that I have a single model, say it's a monster, and I need to paint different varieties of textures on it (e.g. fire-type monster and ice-type monster).
So far I create a different Painter project for each of them. But it's getting out of hand because my game sometimes needs 10+ varieties of the same model. Is it possible to have just one Painter project, with a texture set for each of the varieties?
Replies
You could just have one texture set, and folderize each of the variations to hide/unhide them tidily?
short answer is no sadly and its definitely a bit of a problem - we've had similar issues on a couple of games but thankfully we had a heavily data driven material system for the characters which allowed us to write a system that effectively build the variations on the fly within painter
I'd be using separate files in you situation and ensure that i had scripts to grab and refresh resources etc on load
the real solution is for painter to allow the use of referenced assets properly rather than packing evreything into a single binary file and expand the scripting api to allow for modification of the layer stack.Sadly I cant see that happening for a long time (if ever) and i suspect that's what's going to finally kill it as a serious production tool
Something like "Layer Comps" in PS would be handy in this case.
allowing painted masks to be baked into a smart material would half work for that.
doing that manually could be an option in the short term