How do I combine texture maps on export in Painter?

vlaint

So this is my first time making a game ready character and I'm already finishing up with the textures. However I think I messed it up. What I did was separate the mesh for different materials sharing 1 UV space. I thought it was a good idea since I don't have to bother with using masks, plus I also see some tutorials saying its good to separate materials for ease of texturing (or maybe I just didn't understand correctly lol). But then upon export I get 1 texture set for each and in some textures like normals the dilation even overlaps causing weird artifacts.

I'm thinking of just manually combining in Photoshop. If that won't work I guess I'll have to rebake groups and reimport the whole mesh as 1 texture set and just setup masks. Any way I can do this efficiently?

vlaint

Ok. I watched the substance painter texturing tutorial again and while they did separate each texture set depending on the material I failed to notice each of them had their own UV space. Guess I messed up.

poopipe

to get masks you can use in photoshop...

set up a user channel in each texture set
put a black fill layer that only writes into the user channel and that covers everything
add a white fill layer that only writes into the user channel and  and that only covers the geometry
add the user channel to your export preset
export.. 
 voila - layer masks

vlaint

poopipe said:

to get masks you can use in photoshop...

set up a user channel in each texture set
put a black fill layer that only writes into the user channel and that covers everything
add a white fill layer that only writes into the user channel and  and that only covers the geometry
add the user channel to your export preset
export.. 
 voila - layer masks

Thats a great idea! Didnt think of that one. I already started slowly rebaking with matId but your solution is much easier and faster.Gonna do that. Thanks!

poopipe

i wrote a plugin that sets it all up and does the merging for you a few years ago at work but can't share it for obvious reasons.  that's how it worked though

vlaint

poopipe said:

i wrote a plugin that sets it all up and does the merging for you a few years ago at work but can't share it for obvious reasons.  that's how it worked though

No worries. I kinda get the idea of what you said. I just placed a fill layer with different color on each texture set and exported just the base color to use as color mask.

IngridEngelschion

You can also vertex paint/ID paint your mesh before importing it into Substance Painter. Its really quick and easy and doesn't leave you with more than one material and only the UV spaces you need. Just make sure you pick the right ID map when baking in SP

vlaint

IngridEngelschion said:

You can also vertex paint/ID paint your mesh before importing it into Substance Painter. Its really quick and easy and doesn't leave you with more than one material and only the UV spaces you need. Just make sure you pick the right ID map when baking in SP

Yeah thats what I saw on one tutorial, he painted each mesh with different colors before importing to painter. Thanks for sharing