Genesis 3 to Substance Painter, problem
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,773
Has anyone been able to export Genesis 3 to Substance Painter? I can do so, but only the head template (face, lips, ears) is available for painting. Genesis 2 does not have this problem. I know this is because of G3's new mapping, but I don't know what we have to do to get it working in external programs.
Thanks in advance for any help.
edit: No idea why this was posted twice. My posts have to be approved now, wonder if that's because of spam or because it's me. ;) Mods, please delete one of these threads when you can.
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Substance Painter doesn't support UDIM (as it seems you already know). The way around this is to separate G3F's material zones by UV map, so that everything on a given UV map is on a single material zone (so iirc, you'll end up with I believe 7 or 8 material zones for G3F as she has 7 or 8 maps.. maybe 9, it's been a while since I created mine), and rely on Color ID maps for masking. Be sure to pad the uv edges when you create your Color ID maps to help with seams since Substance Painter can't paint across texture sets.
So I need to use the Surface Editor or whatever it's called in Studio to reduce the number of maps before exporting it? I'll give that a try then, thank you very much.
The geometry editor, yes. For instance, the face, lips, ears, and I believe the eye socket would all be on one material zone, etc.
It's not so much to reduce the number of maps, its so each texture set in substance matches up with one of the uv maps. Otherwise you won't be able to paint on anything located on a uv space outside of 0,1 (which is why you could only do the face bits).
The DS OBJ export dialogue does have an option to collapse the UVs (down to the base unit square). Allegoritmic has indicated that UDIM support is planned for the SP 2 cycle.
Hm, I tried what Vaskania said and I'm getting the same results. I went through this problem before when I tried using Mudbox and apparently got it working back then...no idea what I'm doing wrong here. Maybe I can export as a .dae and then convert that to obj with collapsed UVs? Any further advice is appreciated.
This is what Richard was talking about. Collapse UV on export.
Right, I did find that (thanks though). The problem is that exporting it as an OBJ makes it incredibly slow to manipulate in Substance Painter. I did try what I mentioned; to export it first as an OBJ, then reimport the OBJ into Studio and export again as a .dae and that appears to have worked. An odd workaround but it's something.
You shouldnt collapse them either. If you do, you'll get one big messy map from substance when you go to bake. Ignore this. Collapse them, but still separate the material zones into maps.
Uvs on daz/poser products aren't usually laid out like game assets, which is what substance is geared for. Game assets have no uv overlap whatsoever.
Also, not sure what would be giving you the issues with using OBJ in Substance. I've used it without issue. What version of Painter are you using? 1 or 2?
I haven't tried exporting any textures from Painter yet so I don't know if my OBJ-DAE version will result in a mess like you said.
I'm using version 1 (not going to upgrade until I find a reliable way to get DAZ exports like this into it), but OBJs have always slowed things down to a crawl. My PC and video card are both good, so I assumed the problem was the file format, especially since DAEs are fine.
Actually I was a little wrong in my last post, collapse them, but still separate them by map.
I'll tweak my Quixel version a bit to separate into material zones (quixel uses mesh groups, not material zones, so mine's separated into multiple objects atm) and see if I end up with the same OBJ issue. It may be the current version, it's been a bit since I've actively attempted getting G3F into painter.
/edit 2- adding screenshots. Setup in blender, and working obj in painter. In case it helps you or anyone else coming across this. Note: I separate the eyes and inner mouth to different meshes to keep things on the lower side resource wise. If I do paint them in a 3D app, I prefer not to muck with Genesis' mesh at the same time.
I'm not getting the same OBJ issues as you're experiencing, even with using 4K textures. For comparison's sake, I have 16Gb ram and an EVGA 770 4Gb FTW card.
Well my first problem here is that I don't know how to separate the UVs in Blender or anywhere else. I sure wish I could remember how I solved this problem last year...
I have a 32 GB of RAM and an EVGA 980ti, so yeah I sure don't know what is with OBJs and my system. Maybe how they're being exported? Anyway, thank you for those examples and the help so far. I will test the figure I exported, look on a storage drive for the 'fixed' G3 I saved last year (but I think I deleted), and post any developments. :)
Separating and stacking is a lot easier if all done through blender, so you can visually see the different UV maps. I'd export from Studio without an MTL so you have a clean slate in Blender and don't have to mess with the pre-defined material zones. In my examples, I've already went through and removed the uvs and polys for the unwanted zones (eyes, inner mouth, etc).
Set up your blender the way In my screenshot (I find it easier with UV's on the bottom as then I can zoom in/out to fit them all in one area in a row). There are 2 buttons to pay attention to in the UV editor, you'll need to select the object and tab into edit mode to have them visible- I've circled them in my screenshot. One allows you to see the UVs without anything being selected, and setting it to face mode will allow some hotkeys to work.
Mouse over each UV island on a given map, one map at a time, push L for the first island, and Shift+L for each additional Island. When all islands on a given map are selected, create a new material and name it so you understand what it is when brought into painter. Remember to hit Assign to set those faces to that material. Don't unselect things yet, as you'll need them for the next bit.
The next bit is where it gets a bit more tricker, working with UDIM's in blender. This is all done in the UV window. The UV grid is assumed as 256x256 without an image map loaded. As you get the islands added to material zones, use G -> X -> negative # of pixels. So for instance, if you're wanting to stack the 2nd map on top of the face, with all of the 2nd maps islands still selected, you'd use G -> X -> -256, for the 3rd map, G -> X -> -512, etc (negative to move left, positive to move right). Remember to hit Enter to commit the translation. Here's the video I found on youtube initially which taught me the info:
Be sure to use the A key to unselect all prior to selecting new islands for the next material zone.
If you end up with rogue verts hanging around as I did in the last image, select those and use the same G -> X -> -# as you did for the material they go to and hit Assign on the material itself.
Thank you for that tutorial, I will bookmark it and I'm sure it will be useful to others as well. My OBJ to DAE export actually works as expected (textures export correctly from Substance Painter), so thanks to Richard as well for the UV tip.
Vaskania, do you have Substance Painter 2? If so, have you been able to verify that materials look exactly the same in it's Iray preview as in Studio's render (aside from any Studio-specific material adjustments)? That's something I think a lot of potential Substance customers here would like to know.
I haven't upgraded as I moved from painter to quixel some time back. Knowing me, I'll still upgrade at some point for the hell of it. I have gotten usage out of designer though so I may upgrade that first.