How to set up Genesis 3 uv's for Substance Painter
lululee1
Posts: 343
in The Commons
Hi,
Can yo tell me how to set up Genesis 3 uv's for Substance Painter.
If I use the uv map setup in Substance Painter for more than 1 material zone it is a problem because they are out of range.
If I tell UV mapper to put them in range they are too narrow in Daz Studio.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Cheerio
lululee
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I don't believe you can, and Allegorithmic has said they are 'working on' UDIM support.
Yeah. :/
So is Genesis 3 basically unusable in Allegorithmic?
Do you know if it is the same in Quixel?
Cheerio
lululee
No idea.
I really like Substance Painter, so I'm hoping that they deal with this. Fingers crossed.
Of course, they've also been working, supposedly, on crossing material zones with paint for 3 years now, so... who knows.
I've never had a problem importing an obj with udim uv maps into Substance Painter. You shouldn't need to do anything strange to get them in.
Thanks so much for the info.
I guess I'll have to do things in sections. Too bad.
Cheerio
lululee
Yeah - Substance Painter can't read the Genesis 3 UVs.
I haven't tried this, but you might be able to use one of Cayman Studios Legacy UV products for Genesis 3 (https://www.daz3d.com/cayman-studios) to switch Genesis 3 to an earlier generation UV map and then work on that in SP. You still won't be able to paint across surfaces/material zones but at least the entire UV will be in the range SP is able to read.
I've actually been working on a product that does allow you to paint seamlessly in substance using Genesis figures. The basics right now work, but I also work full time and still need to run it through some more testing and final touches before packing it up and promo work.
Sweet. Will this include G3 and G8?
No problem at all, free here: http://o2leak.com/doku.php?id=freebees
Unless Substance Painter has added the feature to paint across UV borders so you can fix seams, I wouldn't think the program would be good for character creation.
Yep.
It paints across the seams, it doesn't paint over UDIM tiles yet (in works, I've expected it in 2017.2 but no luck). If you want to simply add some features to say face it's good enough. But when you really want to paint over UDIMs you can make texture atlas so body parts you want to paint over will be in one texture. It will work for everything except for very extreme closeups.
Since my comment was in reference to painting Genesis 3, my comment was correct. There was no need to state your comment since the feature to correctly paint genesis 3 in subatance painter does not exist. I haven't upgraded to the latest version because of the painting and the UDIM implementation is not complete.
You don't have to work with UDIM tiles in Substance Painter. Just collapse your tiles on export from Daz Studio.
OBJ Export Options -> Collapse UV Tiles
I think a-sennoc was just agreeing with you and expanding on the idea. It can be helpful to distinguish between seams (splits in a UV map) and the divisions between material zones/surfaces. I don't know if the latter have a technical name but people use "seams" for both and it can get confusing sometimes.
To sum up: you are both right: you can paint across seams in SP, you cannot paint across material zones, and SP can't read the UVs outside the 0-1 range that Genesis 3 uses (which was Male-M3dia's main point I think) despite that being a promised "coming soon" feature in Substance Painter since the beginning of time.
Although SP is still a little limited even with internal seams, like anything related to Normals and AO. (SP is pretty useless with generating Normals, frustratingly)
As for crossing materials, if you can be clever about triplanar tiling and masking, you can, carefully, avoid problems.
Ryzan: Oh my frikken gawd, thank you.
I could have sworn I had already tested that stuff and failed. DUUUH.
And I heartily apologize for giving an authoritative answer that was wroooong.
That's interesting - my experience has been the opposite, but my uses are fairly basic. I am curious what problems you have run into? I do bake my AO maps in Blender because I don't always want nearby by disconnected parts to affect it, but I've never had an issue with normal maps from SP.
I can't figure out a way to prevent a rather noticible line at seams (within a material zone). Now, if the seams are somewhere unimportant, great, but I was working with dragons and kept getting this big distinct line down the middle.
Correction here: it can read Genesis3 UVs correctly and generate correct UDIM tiles on import. The problem is that currently it makes separate texture set per tile and SP cannot paint across texture sets by design. So they are in search of solutions like 'super set' or 'multiple textures inside one set' or whatever else.
The method I described works for me but would my goal be in making new textures for characters I'd make one 2x2 atlas for head-torso-arms-legs and two scripts for GraphicsMagick to pack-unpack textures into this atlas. One day of work,maybe.
This will make UVs to overlap.
Yes, I know. I didn't say they were using the same material. If you want to paint across texture borders, then just put everything on a large 8192x8192 texture atlas. You can put four 4096x4096 maps on it (head,torso,arms,legs). Fits an entire character.
My experince is that if you want truly good quality normal maps from Substance Painter, you need to have two object files; one base resolution and one at the level you sculpted the details at. Of course, it's just as easy for me to use zBrush and Multi-Map exporter for the normals and get the rest from Substance Painter.
Hi,
Thanks to everyone for all of your valuable help.
I am ok with the Collapse UV Tiles. Thanks so much.
Also, what is texture Atlas? Is that in Substance Painter or DS. Still very new to Substance Painter.
Cheerio
lululee
I find Quixel is very good for creating normal maps for the kind of work I do.
Cheerio
lululee
How is QUixel at handling seams (internal or across materials)?
I haven't develeved that far into Quixel for seams.
I really like the ability to go into photoshop and create the normal maps or at least update them.
Quixel allows me to do the stitching or wrinkles etc in PS, then make a normal map with just the stitching and or wrinkles etc.
The Quixel normal maps are very clean. Quixel also has a map converter that will take your normal map and make the height, specular and Ao maps. It will also make a normal map from a diffuse map. Sometimes I like to add buttons or details later and with quixel I can make the button normal map and paste it on top of the original normal map because the button normal is simply a layer in PS. It gives me a lot of flexability.
I think you could take your dragon files into Blacksmith3D and resave them using the bleed uv's function or the clone tool to fix your seams. I find Blacksmith3D is a really valuable utility. You could try the demo to see if it works for you.
Here's a link to a really basic Quixel normal map tutorial. Quixel does need Photoshop to work. You could try the demo to test your seams.
I apologize for the wacky text at the bottom.
Still learning how some of the text functions work.
Cheerio
lululee