Multi-Material / Mesh Workflow ?

[KingMartius]

I've been looking around the web on what people are saying about the the possibilities regarding multi-material workflows. I am not too sure what is currently supported by both Substance Designer & Painter. There's a lot of talk of upcoming features, so its difficult to keep track of what has actually been realised.

More specifically, I want to know whether it is currently possible to have multiple UV tile / sets for separate meshes imported as obj's.

The possibility seems relevant as read in this thread:
http://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?topic=1697.0

"Yes, that's right. If you break a mesh into multiple parts, each part can have it's own UV space where you can make sure to maximize the UV shells for texturing. Substance Painter will very soon work with this setup.

You could also create multiple UV sets in a single mesh and then target different textures to use the specific set. Another method is to use UV Tiles (not tiling like seamless images). This is where you have a single UV set and you place UVs in a tile. So 0-1 is tile one and then you can place UVs out side 0-1 grid. Basically, just keep placing them to the right. So it would be 1-2 and so on.

Here's an image of what UV Tiles looks like. Substance Painter will support this in the future. "

So is the above described workflow currently supported?

[Jerc]

Yes, you can bring fbx or obj scenes with multiple objects each with their own materials and work on each of them in the same project. However all your meshes will need to have their UVs in the 0-1 space currently, we are still working on being able to paint on UV outside that range.

[lilinski]

Aaaah, I hope there is support for multiple UV maps in single or group objects soon. But without having to move additional UV sets to tiles outside of the 0-1 space, because I don't think baking outside of 0-1 works in 3ds Max. Just having to assign a different material or mat ID to each UV map on the mesh would be great. And the ability to simultaneously apply the same layers on a multi-tile mesh in Substance Painter too, please.

[Allegorithmic]

Hey,
I think there is a confusion: so far UV space can only be within 0-1 space.
But you can import a mesh with different IDs (therefore different set of UVs) or an objects composed of different elements (once again with their own UVs).

for your second request, you can use smart materials to reappl a set of layers to another texture set (if it's what you were aiming for)

[lilinski]

Didn't see your response until now. OK I have managed to import a multi mat id mesh in Substance Painter and was not able to bake textures for all of the UV maps at first, but then it suddenly worked. I've copied and pasted the layers onto the other UV map for now (which at first wasn't working either but suddenly it did!) and will look into smart materials now. Thank you for the fast reply!

[lilinski]

Is there a reason for the other UV maps not baking textures or generating black masks correctly (it only generates an entirely white mask) at first but only after 5-10mn of fiddling around ? Because then copying-pasting layers or adding a smart material doesn't work right away. I'm trying to redo what I did earlier from scratch but can't get the masks to generate correctly on the other UV map again.

PS. The black masks generators for the non-working UV map won't let me select the corresponding curvature+AO textures in the Image Inputs, I see the baked textures, but when I select them the thumbnail keeps showing only a red X.

[lilinski]

Ok, so if I import an .obj all is fine, if I import an .fbx, only one of the UV maps bakes textures and assigns them correctly, but any additional UV maps bakes textures but doesn't assign them as Input Images and if you try to drag and drop them to any of the "Additional maps" slots in the TextureSet settings tab, SP consistently crashes. There must be some settings when converting to FBX that are necessary to make this work with an .fbx, but I haven't stumbled on the relevant information in the beginner videos yet.

[Allegorithmic]

mmm weird... Did you double check the scales of your meshes ?
Maybe you can start a new thread here or on our official forum:
https://forum.allegorithmic.com