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Substance DesignerSubstance Designer - Discussions - Re: Temporary Input Nodes?
 on: February 09, 2019, 11:51:13 pm 
Update: I did find some information about this here: https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,915.0.html

Substance DesignerSubstance Designer - Discussions - Temporary Input Nodes?
 on: February 09, 2019, 10:23:48 pm 
This may be a really basic question, but I can't seem to find the answer anywhere.

When building a reusable material in Substance Designer, we can set up inputs and name them things like "curvature" and etc. However, it is very difficult to create an effect or material when absolutely nothing is happening in one of these inputs (black image). What is the typical workflow for this?

1. Do we add a bunch of temporary bitmaps to represent the inputs while we work on a material, then switch it back to the input node when we finish? I hope this is not the answer. This would make it a pain to make tweaks to such materials.

2. Create a second material graph that includes a node for the material we are working on, and plug everything into it there? In this case, I wouldn't know how to preview changes in real time. If I'm visualizing this correctly, we wouldn't see any changes until we switched back to the external material.

3. Have some type of automatic default switching mechanism that employs a temporary bitmap when nothing is plugged into the input nodes? This is my favorite solution. I'm hoping I've just been unlucky in not figuring out how to do this.

Is there something better? It would be great if #3 or something like it was built into the app. Sort of the same work flow as Painter, where saving your material automatically disconnects (temporary) mesh maps and associates them as input nodes.

Thanks for any advice!

Substance DesignerSubstance Designer - Discussions - Re: Order of Operations
 on: February 09, 2019, 10:04:42 pm 
That's great. Is that the case when "what is connected" depends on user input? For example, if I expose an index that dictates which option of the multi-switch node is used, and the user/Substance Painter/etc sets that option to 2, does the material processing algorithm completely avoid processing the input connectors 0, 1, 3, 4, 5, etc, of the multi-switch node?

Another (exaggerated) example:

10 minutes worth of node processing is connected to -> input connector 1 of multi-switch node (off)
5 minutes worth of node processing is connected to -> input connector 2 of multi-switch node (off)
3 minutes worth of node processing is connected to -> input connector 3 of multi-switch node (on)
-- If I processed this material, would it take around 3 minutes or closer to 18?

Thanks again!

Thanks. I did eventually lower the details slider. I had to set it all the way down to 0.07 to avoid most of the artifacts.

Another solution I found was to add some extra polygons to support extreme bends and long cylinder polygons. For example, if there is a long cylinder, adding a "control loop" at the top and bottom of it will significantly reduce curvature map problems. It is obviously not the most efficient solution, but what is a few polygons compared to the billions of pixels we are juggling these days.

Substance DesignerSubstance Designer - Discussions - Order of Operations
 on: February 09, 2019, 04:41:31 pm 
What is the order of operations for processing a material in Designer? Does the execution start at the output or the input?

For example, if I have a multi-switch node that inputs 10 variations and chooses a single image based on an index, does the processor need to generate all of the other 9 variations and throw them away?

If the processing works backwards, then only what is needed would likely be generated. But if it starts at the input node, I'm assuming every possible outcome is computed for every execution, even if only a fraction of it is used.

Thanks for any help!

Just a quick request/suggestion. I use the passthrough setting on a lot of my folders so that each individual layer in that folder can use its own blending modes globally. I suspect a lot of people may do this for various effects? Anyway, it takes a lot of time to switch to each individual channel and set that channel to passthrough. It would be great to have a simple right click command to do this. There doesn't seem to be any right-click commands at all for folders currently, so it certainly shouldn't get in the way. Or just any type of button or command to quickly change a folder to passthrough on all channels would be appreciated.

Another possibility would be some type of modifier key being held when the "new folder" button is pressed that creates a "passthrough" folder.


It's probably not the normal map. What you are seeing is (I'm guessing) some type of glitch in Substance Painter that happens when you display your normal map in 3D. As far as I can tell, that happens with all normal maps when you look at them.

But you have the right idea - Just look through all of your channels and baking maps to isolate the one causing the seam. If none of them have a seam, it may just be a display quirk in Painter. It may be that one of your maps has a UV island too close  to another?

If you set clear as the background and save as PNG, it will save the background as transparent. Then you can copy and paste it onto any background image. But be careful with the shadows. I've noticed that they can cause problems if they are too bright compared to your background image.

It's difficult to notice any problems with your curvature map. Try pressing the B key (keep pressing until curvature shows up in the top right corner), and check out the baked results that way (press M to return to full material). If you see a seam here, try lowering the "details" slider of your curvature baker. Keep lowering it until the seam goes away. I've noticed that if the details slider is too high, it detects UV seams as well as small variations in your low poly vs high poly.

If that doesn't work, you may try adjusting your high poly vs low poly in that specific area.

Substance PainterSubstance Painter - Discussions - Curvature Baking Concerns
 on: February 07, 2019, 03:59:21 pm 
I've been having some issues baking my curvature map inside of Substance Painter. Here is an image of the problem(s):

I've been trying to deal with #1 and #3 for a while now by not using 100% of the curvature in masks, but #2 is something I just recently ran into. Any ideas what might be causing these problems?

It seems like the curvature baker is having trouble combining the low poly with the normal map (or high poly). Is that what's happening? Is there any way to fix any of these problems, other than switching to vertex bake?

NOTE: I'm thinking all of these issues may have something to do with how the normal map is relative to the low poly normals. I wonder if there is some adjustment I can make to the low poly normals to help alleviate this?

Thanks for any advice!

Can you post an image of your curvature map showing this area? Did you try increasing the dilation width in the global settings before baking it?

You're gonna want to create a specialized version of your mesh to paint it. That version would only be used to layout UVs and paint, and not much else.

If you UV-map your rope to reach end-to-end of the UV space (either horizontally or vertically), and make sure any fill textures are tilable in that direction, then you won't have any seams. To paint in Substance, just import a single section of the rope (that reaches from one UV edge to the other, and paint that. Then use the resulting texture on as many segments as you wish.

You may actually want to have a few repeating segments (meshes) welded together for painting so you can see how well they will stitch together as you paint.

If your rope is thin, you should put a bunch of them (segments) into each texture UV space. Just line them up in the opposite direction of the edge-to-edge direction. For this, you would want to import at least one of each into Substance (probably as a single mesh, created just for painting).



I've noticed that there are some Allegorithmic textures in the shelf that are literally just textures (not procedural), but they allow the brightness, contrast, and inversion of the image, regardless of how it is applied. Is there any way to provide this type of control for all textures, automatically?

For example, if I import a custom grunge image to use as a mask multiplier for several mask routines below it, there is no way for me to adjust its contrast. I can't use the levels or any filters because they would influence everything in the mask stack that is below the custom texture.

I started to try to use Substance Designer to setup something like this (I do not yet own it), but realized it would be a ton of work to do this for every grunge image I have.

Anyway, it would be a great feature to have, and I don't think it would be too complex to provide this functionality.

Thank you!

Sometimes when attempting to drag elements from my shelf, I forget to scroll the UI to the drag target (such as the gray scale rectangle on a mask). It would be great if we could scroll down (with the mouse wheel) while still dragging the shelf element, instead of having to release the (mouse) button, scroll the UI, then start the drag all over again. The lack of this feature becomes a bigger problem when using multiple displays and dragging long distances :P

I guess this would either be very easy or very difficult to add, depending on how the UI is currently coded to respond to mouse events. If anyone knows a way to do this with the current program, please let me know!


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