Anonymous at Tue, 29 Mar 2022 16:27:18 UTC No. 889169

I'll hijack your thread to ask a stupid question that doesn't deserve its own thread.
For gamedeving (with Unreal Engine), what would be the best tool to learn between Painter and Designer?
I'm sculpting in ZBrush, retopo/rig/animate in Maya. I didn't learn jack shit about texturing yet.

Anonymous at Tue, 29 Mar 2022 16:56:00 UTC No. 889174

>>889169
you make substances in designer which you apply in painter instead of using painters shitty built in substances

Anonymous at Tue, 29 Mar 2022 17:22:46 UTC No. 889178

>>889169
you can't really use designer on its own

Anonymous at Tue, 29 Mar 2022 17:24:02 UTC No. 889179

>>889178
yes you fucking can. it has nodes for conversion that you can run on already done textures that painter doesnt have

Anonymous at Tue, 29 Mar 2022 17:33:47 UTC No. 889183

>>889169
Painter easily, unless you specifically want to make your own textures using a procedural node based system. Painter is like 3d Photoshop, so you can go far by layering existing ones. And it does not have just be static image textures, you still have access to procedural ones made in Designer that you can tweak.

Anonymous at Tue, 29 Mar 2022 17:40:26 UTC No. 889185

>>889183
painter without designer is like a car without its wheels

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 00:46:46 UTC No. 889256

>>889185
Not really, SD is still optional, unless you're a material artist, while Painter is a requirement almost everywhere. We don't really generate new base mats in SD for every prop, that would be pointless. It's either made from scratch in Painter instead because it's often good enough for that, or some base scanned texture is used, and the rest is applying layers with procedural masks and hand painted stencils. Painter is very flexible.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 01:03:34 UTC No. 889257

>>889256
>Not really, SD is still optional, unless you're a material artist, while Painter is a requirement almost everywhere.

anon, people who use painter are material artists. Are you losing it.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 11:58:36 UTC No. 889313

>>889257
I'm talking about a position where you create tileable mats, not where you texture props. Sure, you can use Zbrush and Painter to make tileables as well. But that's what's called a "material artist" and it's usually done with SD. Painter is for texturing assets primarily. So obviously it's something that should be prioritized as it's needed everywhere: prop artists, environment artists, character artists, vehicles, weapons etc.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 12:08:56 UTC No. 889314

>>889313
99.99% of the time you do both at once

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 12:20:17 UTC No. 889315

>>889314
Use both SD and SP? Maybe in your area of 3D, not even close when it comes to assets, I barely open SD unless I need some really special thing. Even for tileables I use a lot of Painter instead, it's more powerful for that than most people think.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 12:25:41 UTC No. 889317

>>889315
yes, thats the natural way to do it. The vertical layer stack of painter is simply shit and the built in substances are also shit. Almost every tutorial worth its salt will tell you the same thing as well.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 13:00:24 UTC No. 889322

>>889168
I understand that UDIMs can improve efficiency in terms of UV space coverage. It makes sense that rather than trying to cram everything into one big texture, splitting it up into several smaller ones might have benefits. But if efficiency is desired wouldn't splitting the UVs into individual faces be the best?

I understand that this would result in a lot of seams while painting, but you could have hand-crafted UVs just for the sake of texture painting and reproject that to individual face UVs after it has been done.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 14:35:29 UTC No. 889328

>>889168
How do you use 3d Perlin noise? It seems to require a position map, but I am not sure where to get that.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 14:57:33 UTC No. 889330

>>889328
Go to Texture Set Setting -> Bake Mesh maps and then bake out the position maps. After that placing the 3d noise should plug it automatically.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 15:31:08 UTC No. 889337

>>889317
Who said you should use built in substance? lol...

>The vertical layer stack of painter is simply shit
That's like your opinion, man.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 16:31:51 UTC No. 889346

What do I do about these seams? I imported the model from Blender and they don't appear when I texture paint in it.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 17:05:09 UTC No. 889351

>>889346
I literally can't paint over them to fix them.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 17:57:34 UTC No. 889358

>>889346
Make edges sharp wherever there is a seam and rebake.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 19:42:57 UTC No. 889376

>>889358
This makes no sense to me since marking edges sharp in Blender affects normals. But the reason why I have seams in the image is because the fill layer underneath the paint one is white.

What I thought was the problem is that the padding wasn't there. So I padded the islands, set the brush alignment to UV, but it still fails to get rid of them. I didn't think seams would be this much of a problem.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 19:54:33 UTC No. 889377

>>889376
It makes no sense to you, because it is completely wrong. Substance Painter rapes all sharp seams to absolute shit. Never use sharp seams unless you absolutely have to force normals in some specific way.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 19:57:10 UTC No. 889380

>>889377
why did >>889358 say to use sharp seams then?

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 19:57:43 UTC No. 889382

>>889380
Because retards say retarded shit

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 20:07:00 UTC No. 889383

>>889382
>>889377
I fucking new some retard will come here and acting smart again lol. Sure dude, I don't know what I'm doing, you help him then.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 20:09:37 UTC No. 889384

>>889382
>>889377

I fucking knew some retard will come here and act smart lol. Sure dude, I don't know what I'm doing, you help him then. This is not the first time I see somebody recommending people to just shade smooth everything. I bet you're that same guy.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 20:56:15 UTC No. 889387

>>889377
I think it depends on how you set it up and also there’s probably some misunderstanding going on. I’ve witnessed countless discussions about this topic in 3d communities and there are a lot of clashing opinions and confused people. I also see various “popular” tutorials being shared around featuring opposing views.

It confused me as well, still somewhat does, but ever since I started using “sharp edges from uv islands” option in uv toolkit addon for blender, I always had perfectly clean bakes. And that addon does make all the edges where the seams are hard. I get errors at seams if my meshes are completely smooth, i.e. they have a single smoothing group. This addon basically makes the edges of uv islands sharp / hard and it works for me. Also my props passed through various pro studio AA and AAA level clients and rigorous tech checks and nobody ever found issues with them.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 21:25:50 UTC No. 889393

>>889351
I figured it out completely now. The reason for the seams was definitely insufficient padding between the islands. I also had the problem of with post-beveled UVs stretching past the boundaries. This wasn't obvious when I was looking at the UVs in Blender since the beveling was done using a modifier, but I noticed it immediately in Substance Painter's UV view.

It seems that setting the padding to when packing or unwrapping 0.01 is fine.

Anonymous at Wed, 30 Mar 2022 21:33:15 UTC No. 889394

>>889393
Yeah bevels can fuck you up because when they apply on export they will create additional seams and cause stretching. Apply bevels before unwrap.

Anonymous at Sat, 2 Apr 2022 13:30:56 UTC No. 889782

>>889168
Is it possible to paint a stencil directly in Substance Painter similarly to how painting works in Mari? I want to do some radial patterns and it would be a lot easier if instead of drawing all the lines by hand, I could just deform a single line while moving the camera around.

Anonymous at Sat, 2 Apr 2022 16:49:12 UTC No. 889798

>>889314

You're clueless. Material artists are specialists, they hire people just to make tileable materials. You're not a texture artist if you texture your models in painter, you're just a 3d artist who textures his own models like he's expected to do.
è
Don't tell me you make absolutely all of your materials in designer before sending them to Painter because you can already do all of those non tileable materials inside of painter.

Anonymous at Sat, 2 Apr 2022 23:12:10 UTC No. 889837

>>889798
This, that's what I was saying, but that guy is probably a student pretending he knows it all, thinking you're not a real artist if you don't use SD regularly. It seems we all go through that phase. No dude, you don't in fact have to create your own base materials in SD for every single prop. No, that doesn't make you less of an artist. Grow up.

:BOOMER:

Anonymous at Sun, 3 Apr 2022 02:47:41 UTC No. 889860

>>889837
Before I realized that SP was a thing, I thought you had to bring models into designer to texture them.
I spent like 3 hours trying to figure out how to import my model of Shadow Moses Island into Substance Designer before I realized that Designer wasn't for texturing models. It's for making textures, but not for any one specific model.
Mind you, this was way back in the day before they cleaned up the UI.

Anonymous at Sun, 3 Apr 2022 13:59:25 UTC No. 889927

>>889168
I've heard that Painter is non-destructive. How literal is that? Can you work in 2048 and upscale later to automatically get improved image quality instead of having raw pixel values being interpolated to the larger image size? If so, that would be pretty cool.

Anonymous at Sun, 3 Apr 2022 14:08:49 UTC No. 889928

>>889927
sp records all your strokes and actions and re-calculates all this for higher res
and this is root problem/feature why it works so fucking bad

Anonymous at Sun, 3 Apr 2022 14:52:41 UTC No. 889932

>>889928
>and this is root problem/feature why it works so fucking bad
It sounds good. What is so bad about it?

Anonymous at Sun, 3 Apr 2022 16:40:51 UTC No. 889939

Is anyone unironically using those leak brushes? I never bothered since the results looked terrible, stencils all the way. But maybe it's decent if you know how to use it?

Anonymous at Mon, 4 Apr 2022 04:31:25 UTC No. 890036

>>889939
Like the particle ones?
They're pretty shit on their own, but if you add some blur on top and some creative masks they can look alright. Plus they have the added benefit of actual physical propagation as opposed to a stencil or something where you eyeball where it "should" be.
I think they're best used as a mask of where leaks should go, rather than using them straight up.
So I'll pour on the particles, put a blur on top of that to specify an area, and then under all of that I'll do my stencils and other texture work. Then if shit still looks iffy, I'll put some textures on the particle mask to break it up a bit.

Anonymous at Thu, 7 Apr 2022 15:45:30 UTC No. 890644

>>889169
I am studying Designer and I've realized that a lot of the nodes used in it are also present in Painter. So it is actually very beneficial to study the former for the sake of the later. How various nodes are supposed to be used becomes a lot more clear once I saw them being used in Designer.

Anonymous at Sun, 10 Apr 2022 15:10:35 UTC No. 891104

>>889168
Here is the textured version of the desk. I finally learned enough to get it done. Though I am doing it as an asset for a game, it is actually my own desk.

(1/2)

Anonymous at Sun, 10 Apr 2022 15:24:49 UTC No. 891106

>>891104
I did all the edge chip damage by hand as well as the wood grain pattern. For the wood grains on the top I did not do all the lines by hand, instead I projected radial gradients down in 8 different places and did some filter magic to make it appear tiled. It would have been simpler to do the pattern in Designer, but I wanted to see how far I could push Painter.

Some variation I did using the smudge tool, and the paint chip pattern are a combination of slope blur and custom painted scratches. The fiber brush is good for those. I spent hours trying out grunge textures and noise patterns, but none of them came out good which is why I stated doing it manually.

For the black painted wood's wear damage, I used the knife paint brush which is also a kind of scratch brush. In the setting the amount is set far too high to see this. It has useful settings for varying the stroke per stamp and adding rotation variation.

For the white pattern in the sliding board, I used spray paint. There is also some color and roughness variation using inverted gaussian noise that is not apparent in the screenshot.

A part of me thinks that 2k textures used here are not enough, but the fine grained details are not visible at this resolution. Once I zoom in though even 4k is not enough and I get the feeling that textures are a scam.

Anonymous at Sun, 10 Apr 2022 15:36:44 UTC No. 891109

>>891106
Now that I am done, I realize that I've made a mistake assigning every part of the object to its own texture set. I'd want to merge some of that, but because the layers are associated to texture sets I don't think that would work. If I had to do it all again, I'd learn the UDIM workflow first, as well as learn how to use geometry masks. I don't how to assign geometry groups in Blender just yet.

Also that anon got a lot of heat for favoring Designer. I was against it initially, but trying to do anything intricate with Painter's layers gets hard pretty quickly, so if I had to do anything intricate in the future I'd favor doing as much as possible in Designer. Though, I'd don't think I'll be doing too much of that. The desk is special as it will be close to camera, so I had to put in a bit extra effort.