Multiple Props, 1 UV Set

Jumbee

Props don't fill the UV1 fully so after I am done painting and exporting the first asset. I layout another models uvs into the remaining space and texture them too.

My problem is: after I export the second models textures, now I have to combine their textures using photoshop. Since I export them with their RGBA channels packed, It is a lot of headache to work with them in photoshop. Masking, RGB channels, alpha channels etc.

Is there a better way of doing this process.

Thanks everyone for the help in advance.

Alex_J

marmoset toolbag can do packing for you. i think you could do same thing in substance painter as well.

basically import both models as one fbx. use fill layers to assign the textures that were made for each separate model. export - now multiple textures are combined to a single.

Ghogiel

to do the above, in painter you'll have to make a mask to stop the second props texture from smearing itself all over the whole UV space with it's streaky padding. import both models as 1 fbx and 1 texture set. import textures as well (maybe export both sets as 16bit initially to perhaps not be double compressing them to 8bit), make 2 fill layers and slot in the textures, add a mask to the top layer and black out where you want it to pass through and both props should look textured.

In designer you could make a graph where you just import all the relevent textures and mask and it could be reusable if you end up doing it a lot

gnoop

I prefer Blender for this.  Attach objects together,  then create new empty texture and make it active  "target" ( its node selected)   in all materials  ( drag and drop  new texture from image pane to shader pane in each material)  .  Copy UV set and keep the original one with camera mark on while the new selected   one with that mark off .    Bake .  That's all.   

You can do same without attaching the meshes together  but  then it  would do  the padding  of one object covering the first one .  Still works with 2 pix padding usually.   

Same way it works in MAx too as far as I remember.  But I did it ages ago there.  Sympligon should do it too.

ps. You don;t even have to bake to same UV . The new  uv set  could be  different if you need it

ps2.  In Photoshop it's all  not that troublesome too actually.  You don't need masks . Just bake you textures with 1 pix padding  and black  background  and use  "add" blending mode for  the second set of textures . Turn alphas into  grayscale layers  by "apply image" command  and  then same dialog to put it back to alpha .   It all could be  recorded in an action   so you could do it all in just one click .   You can do padding by  series of 1 pix "max" filter   by an action too.   Look at Adobe scripting forum for some  commands. Like switching properly  in between documents.   By default Photoshop  consider documents in order of opening.  Look for a script that allow to go forth and back in between exact specific pair of documents.   Also people there often agree to write scripts for free there.  But as far as I recall it all could be just actions.  

    In SPainter it could work same way actually  with "add" blending   over black background.  Too bad it  doesn't have record-able actions.

ps3.   Set  Grey to sGray in Phtotoshop "Color settings".   This way Photoshop would already think that gray values are in default sRGB  space and wouldn't  change them when you copy alpha info to a layer. So values would be perfectly same .

Jumbee

Overall it is a simple task but it really gets crowded if you have around 20 different channel packed assets. All that smoothness, metallic, transparency etc. Masking all of them one by one can be so annoying and time consuming.  I really was hoping for a software that does it all with one click, since it is a simple task. I guess not. I will unfortunately go back to masking and copy pasting RGBA channels one by one. But I will definitely try to create a substance designer method as you guys mentioned. 

poopipe

add a channel to your texture set in painter, fill with white in that channel - voila, mask for each object.