Hi guys, i'm hoping there are some people here who use Substance Painter 2 for their textures, because i'm looking for some advice.

Now i know i can't produce textures with all the "shiny" that Substance Painter can produce for PBR textures, i understand and accept this limitation, however what i would like to do is to be able to put say a metal texture onto an object, and then export the combined output as a basic image texture, a normal map, and a specular map, like it shows in the texture preview, so i can use them in GameGuru.

Is this possible?

If so can anybody give me a step by step of the work flow, what i need to know mainly is:

1. Are there any add-ons i will need for this? If so, where can i get them, and how do i install them?
2. When i start the new project, which settings so i need to start with?
3. When i import a model, which settings do i need to import with?
4. Are there any settings between importing the model and exporting the texture i need to change?
5. When i export the textures, which settings do i need to use?

Any help you guys can give me would be awesome, and my final apology of the post, i apologize if this is a big ask, i'm new to substance painter and i really want to get some use out of it.

I think the trick is going to be roughness
here's an example with a Substance in Thea Render, without the roughness map it looks really bright and I'd imagine it would anti alias badly in GG
The metallic was used as a layer mask in Thea, the top is a basic diffuse layer the lower is a glossy layer

I think I can share the textures, I'll check

I'm not sure how this has anything to do with what i asked. I'm not asking how to combine them outside of Sbstance Painter, what i'm asking is how to export the textures in a non-pbr format from substance, ie just a single texture, not all these metallic, roughness, height, glossiness, etc, just the plain texture.

Yes.
If the tool is new for you , you can follow some video starter tutorials to know how the tool works about basics
Its' a fantastic tool.



1) import your 3D object already UVmapped in Substance

2) create for example a "fill layer" and drop a material like metal to fill the whole object as a starting base

3) Start painting using available materials as you wish ( add details with masks , use subtsance effects generators like the erosion or scratches etc ...)

4) Choose to export all textures maps using the good basic preset : diffuse,normal, roughness, metallic

5) Diffuse and normal map are directly usable, but you must manually use a painting software to create the specular map for GG.
In a painting program open the roughness and adjust grey levels to make it look good in GG (adjusting grey levels is easy using sliders like on Gimp2)
Most of the time roughness is the most appropriated, but you can combine Roughness and metalness textures using layers and adjusting their level.

It's experimentation you make until you find it looking good in GG, once you'll have done it some times, you'll feel more at ease to make the specular map.




I am not aware of addons to make specular because specular maps are really different from the modern rendering.


Check you are working in the standard : roughness/Metlaness and choose the right textures size you want


An UV mapped model that's all you need, it accepts obj and FBX if i am not wrong.


You can import a premade diffuse or normal map, and also import a specular map as roughness and start from here.
But after exporting your textures, you'll have to tweak roughness tomake your GG specular map ad the results you see in Substance Painter 2 are physically based rendering.


The standard export preset : diffuse,normal,roughness, metalness. And tweak manually roughness to make the specular or combine the metalness.
You can try the other preset : Glossiness-specular export instead of roughness-metalness , but this don't change lot of things as you still have to tweak the maps to make your GG specular.


I have already used that workflow for tests on 3D engines that didn't had modern rendering support like Physically based GGX, and this is the way i used to get the most closer possible to Substance Painter work.
But you'll be a little demoralised seeing your great work on Substance Painter not looking like a great in GG lol

I hope it helps.

This is the problem right here, the standard diffuse produced is not a texture, it always comes out for me as a black mess, and looks nothing like the texture preview. I've been through every single one of the presets and they all come out with images that do not relate to a texture. I'm not really worried about normal or specular, i can do them with other programs, i just want to get a damned texture out of it, but it won't do it.

I hate substance painter with a passion.In it's purest form requires that you have already baked your normal information, with cavity, AO, Normal, and height map. Using a combination of photoshop, and gimp could probably do every thing in photoshop, but I like the plugins for gimp far more as it has better control over seeding the texture.

With regards to your question, PBR basically inverts the metal colour, in other words grey shows up as a black diffuse, so you simple need to change to a light greyish, perhaps with a slight super light blue tint.

This however when applied to any textures results in flatish textures, so the trick is to bake cavity information from the normal map information as a slighty darker grey or light back colour with some transparency applied this will be baked directly onto the diffuse, after which you need to add a bit weathering of again with some transparency.

So basically if you make a metal texture that needs to come up grey/white you simply need to invert the colour from black.Some thing like below.That said I prefer the none destructive nature of photoshop and gimp, while it is far from prefect, substance painter requires that you use photoshop any ways to paint normals.The most important aspect most people miss out on, is baking an AO map from a high res model, if you have a AO map you can basically create any map you need from normals to height map, and create a colour ID map.I would say learn all you can about normal painting and AO baking in which ever 3D editor you use, then you can have a headache about a work flow for substance painter.

Textures are going to be a 1000000 times better once you have a fully understanding of cavity/height/AO/normals as they are essential to the substance painter work flow.

OK, i kind of understand what you're saying, but how do i change the colour?

Ooh, i have a cunning plan .... i'll just export them as PBR textures, then go back into blender, and using cycles add them to the model, then bake them out in a combined texture, something to test out tonight

On the right hand side of substance should be a colour swatch like photo shop.Download a couple of youtube substance work flows to get a better understanding.

Other then that I don't know past the substance trial I did many many moons back, was meh switched over to photoshop and will get marmoset toolbag next month which will assist in realtime colour editing directly from photoshop.

OK, thanks for the help guys.

Been doing a lot of looking into this, and apparently SP2 just doesn't have a non-PBR shader so will only output PBR, so basically i wasted my money on it

I'll try the idea i had above to import them into blender and output the result to a texture, hopefully that works.

In the meantime, does anybody use any other software like this they can recommend that can output a colour texture? I just want something i can use to paint details and such, Blender has this kind of thing built in, but it's very clunky and a bit hit and miss.

If you have $300 + to blow send me a PM, and I will share what I use and offer help.

Ouch, i wish i did.

sorry my explaination sucked.. it made sense in my head, what I was trying to say Thea just layers the images like you would in PS or Gimp

I tend to model, texture and bake

Some people are using Sculptris..... Blender is probably going to be similar a similar workflow though
or PolyBrush is cool, it wouldn't be much good for GG but its cheap
I use C4D but only because I had money 3 years ago! now I'm very poor so I've never updated it

Go hungry a month, it's worth it, the quality of my work exploded a 100 times.

Very hush hush,share what tools you are using.nobody is looking .

Dave

Send me a PM