Hello
How can I export drawing shapes as an alpha image to use in Substance Designer?

After a quick Google search of "Substance designer alpha", it seems that an "alpha" may be some sort of mask, a .png, or .jpg.???

So what is an alpha???

- Brian

An Alpha seems to be a white on black background .jpeg or .png.
Or colored?
It is added, or imported to Substance Designer.

Transparency? Background is black/transparent?

Gimp can create a rounded rectangle Alpha...

Watched a youtube video...Steve's Tutorial, How to import custom alphas,
(Paint splatter vector)

Moi posts about pdf exports, and affinity designer2 might be relevant?

- Brian

Ambimind made a script awhile back that broke things down.

http://moi3d.com/forum/lmessages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1049.33

He noted that keeping the default grey background was easy enough to “magic wand” for alpha?

Maybe if really needed somebody can help set background to black. (Probably have to change a few other settings like line colors then too.)

The PDF export and Affinity Designer2 that Brian mentioned may possibly be the following thread that I asked about myself in the past: https://moi3d.com/forum/lmessages.php?webtag=MOI&msg=11144.1

(Fixed URL)

marzRX

The Ambimind script places the image on Clipboard

Hi METE,

re:
> Hello
> How can I export drawing shapes as an alpha image to use in Substance Designer?

I might need a little more information on what you're trying to do, but if you want to export 2D drawings to use in Substance Designer it looks like it supports SVG import:
https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-designer/resources/vector-graphics-svg-resource.html

The MoI v5 beta supports output to SVG format, you can get the v5 beta at: https://moi3d.com/beta.htm .


Or if you mean you want to bring 3D shapes from MoI into Substance you could export them to .obj or .fbx format and load those into Substance Designer:
https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-designer/resources/3d-scene-resource.html


Or is it that you want to take a screenshot of your viewport in MoI and take that into Substance Designer as a .png image file?


From your brief description I'm not sure which of these you're wanting to do.

- Michael

If it's that you want a screenshot with a transparent background, something you can try is to export to .ai format with the "Shaded background" option turned on.

The shaded background will be a PNG image with a transparent background that will be saved alongside the .ai file. You can just take the .png and delete the .ai file.

That will also happen with SVG or PDF export as well, except for PDF the pixel data for the shaded background image is contained inside of the PDF and not as a separate .png file.

- Michael

An Alpha is not a grey level image ?

Hi Pilou,

re:
> An Alpha is not a grey level image ?

Usually "alpha" is transparency information that can be stored in an image in addition to color image data.

There are often tools or modes that can show you the alpha channel temporarily as a grayscale image as another way to work on it though.

- Michael