Substance Painter: 2 noobazoid questions

[Jennifer 17]

Hey guys, 

 

I'm really feeling the Substance Painter and been watching tutorials for the past couple of days. Would love if someone who has any experience with SP could answer the following:

 

1. In order to work in SP, as far as I understand, the model must be UV unwrapped, I don't suppose one can just shove an OBJ or FBX into it and hope it's gonna unwrap everything itself, and then make me a cup of coffee, correct? I have mentioned in one of my previous topics - I am very bad with UV unwrapping and wondering if Auto mode in RIZOM UV will be enough to then take the model to SP

 

2. Granted I somehow unwrapped the model  and now going bonkers in SP with all the brushes, just like every girl would do. Once I'm done, how do I correctly export it to be able to use it in C4d (unwrapped texture maps)?  What's the relationship like between SP and C4d? 

 

Cheers

 

[Cerbera 2,791]

Heads up, I don't have Substance, but do know a little about how it works and what its advantages and disadvantages are.

 

Yes, I think you do need to UV stuff. But this is not so challenging because it doesn't have to be a perfect UV map - you just don't want loads of unnecessary seams or overlapping polys. Even the former of those Substance can deal with because it is very good at hiding seams, so even Cinema's default unwraps can provide a workable result AND you can instantly convert standard projections to UVs with a single button in Cinema's UV edit. Although (again) I don't have it, I would imagine that Rizom's default unwraps are even better.

 

CBR

[Jennifer 17]

2 hours ago, Cerbera said:

Heads up, I don't have Substance, but do know a little about how it works and what its advantages and disadvantages are.

 

Yes, I think you do need to UV stuff. But this is not so challenging because it doesn't have to be a perfect UV map - you just don't want loads of unnecessary seams or overlapping polys. Even the former of those Substance can deal with because it is very good at hiding seams, so even Cinema's default unwraps can provide a workable result AND you can instantly convert standard projections to UVs with a single button in Cinema's UV edit. Although (again) I don't have it, I would imagine that Rizom's default unwraps are even better.

 

CBR

Hey Cerbera, thanks for the input. Is there such thing as one-button-unwrap in cinema 4d? Let's say I want to unwrap this object *attached. How do I go about it in Cinema 4d? I mean for the life of me, UVs is just something I can't wrap (uv unwrap lol) my head around!! jeez. 

weirdobject.c4d

[Cerbera 2,791]

4 hours ago, Jennifer said:

Is there such thing as one-button-unwrap in cinema 4d?

 

Yes. There are 2 methods for that, cubic and 'by angle'. Here's the first one.

 

 

You can see the issue with this though - sure - it has laid out all the polys flat with no overlaps (good), but it has also separated it into hundreds of tiny islands (bad), so there are loads of seams all over the model, and their placement is uncontrollable. However that may be all you need for Substance... best thing is to try it and see.

 

We should also note that meshes produced by the volume mesher don't make great UV maps even in the best of circumstances because of the somewhat arbitrary nature of (or in worst case total lack of!) poly flow through the mesh, which makes seams difficult to choose and select and also awkward to see and work with (polygon density-wise) in the UV view. Had this shape been made (or retopo'd) via regular poly modelling it would be  a lot easier to UV properly and you wouldn't have to rely on any spurious auto-methods with all those unnecessary seams.

 

CBR

[Marander 26]

Hello Jennifer

 

As Cerbera mentioned, topology is very important for UV unwrapping.

 

Depending on the complexity of the object, usually you just have to mark a couple of seams to properly unwrap

 

With a dense mesh or bad topology (no polyflow, missing edge loops, ngons, tris etc) this is difficult. To have hundreds of auto unwrapped UV islands is not ideal for precise texturing.

 

There is the new tool QuadRemesher from EXOSIDE that auto retopos the object, the Cinema Plugin is just being released now. Simple to use with good results. It helps for example if you used booleans, scans or VDB modeling. A good (subd) topology is still better but requires more modeling work.

 

Also, maybe you could have a look at the Cinema plugin Seamilar which is very easy to use for basic UV'ing and well integrated in C4D, you can see the unwrapping while drawing the seams. RizomUV and 3D-Coat are great too of course.

 

Also you could create separate parts of the object for having separate TextureSets in Substance. You will export separate maps for each TextureSet.

 

Which maps you need with what export settings depends on the render engine but usually you need Normal, Height/Bump, Color/Diffuse, Roughness and Specular or Metallic maps which you load in the appropriate material channels.

 

Cheers, Michael