Recreating Blender Workflow in Substance Painter (Stylized Turret)

[markallanholley]

Good morning,

I’m following Grant’s course on the stylized turret. My .blend has many different objects with a single UV map and texture map. I’ve started painting in Blender.

I wanted to export and finish painting in Substance Painter to get used to that workflow, and because I can add details like stylized snow pretty easily with Painter.

So, I exported all of the turret objects as .fbx and imported them into Painter, then I imported what I’d painted so far in Blender as an image texture. No problem.

My trouble is - in Substance Painter, I can’t seem to select individual objects to paint - I’m always painting on everything I exported from Blender. In Blender, you can select by object by going into object mode, or quick-select them with so paint doesn’t spill over onto other non-selected objects.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks. : )

[CoreyKnecht]

I don’t have any experience with Substance Painter, so I’m not sure if there’s a way to mask your selection or not. The import may not even recognize the Object classifications and sees everything as one model (fbx does carry this information, but I don’t know if Substance Painter makes use of it).

What I would do in this case is plan your texpainting in stages based on what needs to be masked, and do multiple import/export procedures accordingly with only the modules you need at each stage. For example, import the whole model for a base coat, export back to Blender, then import one arm at a time and work on those, etc… Not ideal, but you should be able to do most things this way.

[NP5]

Sorry never even seen Substance Painter. Never would.
The course does it all in Blender. So why would anyone use another software?
There are probably courses on using SP or on YT videos that may help you.

[FedPete]

Maybe all those objects are connected to that single one texture file.
Substance painter is just a smart copy of Photoshop, where calculations between layers is handled (adding, subtraction normal layers etc…). You are not working on a single (part) of an object, but working on a single texture.

• Are you sure your object exsist of multiple objects (loose meshes)?
  Not an object containing multiple meshes?

But as many student already mentioned, not many students will use payed software. Including me, so I can’t tell you how you can solve this problem. Maybe ask this question on a Substance Painter forum.

[bOBaN]

So I will go against the crowd here, and say good for you. SP is the best software for texturing out there there is. Nothing is close, especially for game assets (for movies Mari is popular, I heard good thing about Toolbag 5 texture painting too, but haven’t tried that yet). Unfortunately Blender doesn’t come even close SP capabilities.

The thing is with SP is that the workflow is totally different. There are many approaches to your ‘problem’, but in general - use masking. You can mask it in many different ways, the simplest is adding a mask with mesh fill or polygon fill. Basically like that:

Simple masking in SP

(I used smart material to showcase this, but you can have paint layer and use masks on that)

But in normal workflows I would basically do id map for it and use id for masking. SP is specialised software, I really recommend watching some YT tutorials (official ones are good, but there are a lot out there) or doing some courses.

Edit: just noticed that recording cut off part of the menu. I use there “Add Black Mask”. Also note on the left side of the screen I have polygon fill tool selected already.

[CoreyKnecht]

This makes sense - thanks for hopping in on these =)

[markallanholley]

Just wanted to thank people for their replies. Exporting and texturing by object and masking both seem like they would be great solutions.

[bOBaN]

@markallanholley

Exporting and texturing by object

this will work, but will be a pain as you will have to join the textures somehow at the end. It’s doable, but it’s kind of unnecessary extra steps (esp. if you will do full PBR workflow and have like 5 texture sets per objects).