Substance Designer > Painter workflow ?
polycounter lvl 13
Hi here!
I am trying to figure out what would be the optimal workflow to make all created substances available to several artists of the same team over a network, and so I was wondering if any of you here already have some efficient workflow?
1- Would you set up as shelf a directory that is under version control, and share it across all the artists of your team?
Do every artist publish manually a sbsar file to this shelf folder, or do you rely on some automation system (Maybe using the SubstanceAutomationToolkit )?
2- Artists often create substances with the intention of creating a simple tiling texture, but then if another artist want to use that substance in their substance painter workflow, the first artist might not have published the .sbsar file. So do you have a rule that every artist creating a substance file has to also publish the sbsar file? And also has to maintain it every time he upgrades/tweaks the texture? (I imagine human error could happen often if this process is manual, especially if artists are for example focused on the exported texture instead of the sbsar.)
3- Do you use a symmetrical folder structure between the sbs and the sbsar files, or are all the sbsar files simply stored in the same folder as the sbs file?
4- Do you have some scripts to update and export textures from substance painter file if a sbs/sbsar file has been updated?
I would love to hear your opinion about all that.
Julien.
I am trying to figure out what would be the optimal workflow to make all created substances available to several artists of the same team over a network, and so I was wondering if any of you here already have some efficient workflow?
1- Would you set up as shelf a directory that is under version control, and share it across all the artists of your team?
Do every artist publish manually a sbsar file to this shelf folder, or do you rely on some automation system (Maybe using the SubstanceAutomationToolkit )?
2- Artists often create substances with the intention of creating a simple tiling texture, but then if another artist want to use that substance in their substance painter workflow, the first artist might not have published the .sbsar file. So do you have a rule that every artist creating a substance file has to also publish the sbsar file? And also has to maintain it every time he upgrades/tweaks the texture? (I imagine human error could happen often if this process is manual, especially if artists are for example focused on the exported texture instead of the sbsar.)
3- Do you use a symmetrical folder structure between the sbs and the sbsar files, or are all the sbsar files simply stored in the same folder as the sbs file?
4- Do you have some scripts to update and export textures from substance painter file if a sbs/sbsar file has been updated?
I would love to hear your opinion about all that.
Julien.
Replies
We use a template painter material graph to manage output channels (you don't necessarily want them all).
Designer materials are plugged into that and saved with the rest of the painter specific materials in a folder structure mirroring the categories we want in our shelf. These are done as a matter of course - almost everything we do in designer gets mirrored into painter.
Sbsar generation is done with automation toolkit based on the content of these folders - we can choose to do individuals or the whole lot in one go.
We sometimes build painter materials off baked maps from designer rather than the raw graphs this works fine when authoring for layered shaders or similar and can cut out a lot of processing time.
Change propogation can be done selectively with automation toolkit - there's a set of libraries etc. if you understand the API you'll be able to implement it, if you can't then you're going to struggle a bit.
I've not got the details in front of me but a google should reveal all and failing that you ask allegorithmic