Hi,

I am using the trial version and made a little wall with 2 windows and a door. If I export this as an object, (all triangles, subdivide faces smaller than 1) and load it into Substance Painter, it paints all over the object, not on the individual items (windows, door etc.)
The export seems to mess up the mesh?

HEEEEEEELP!

I really want to buy MoI, but I need to be able to add materials and paint the resulting objects for later rendering.

Thanks for your time, any help much appreciated.

Hi Death, you will need to discard the default uv texture coordinates that MoI generates and set up a new uv mapping inside of Substance Painter.

- Michael

Cool!

But: (there's always a but) ;-)

How do I do that? I have no clue on how to drop the UV map and setting up a new UV mapping inside of SP...

Hi Death, I'm sorry but I don't use Substance Painter myself so I don't know the answer to that. I'd recommend doing a Google search for something like "Substance Painter uv mapping", or asking on a Substance Painter forum if nobody else happens to chime in here.

- Michael

I tried, but couldn't figure it out...

Is this a bug in MoI, or a bug in the Subst.Paint? It also doesn't work in Armory, the weird thing is, it works in Tool-bag and the Owlet, so I am confused.

What I am looking for is an actual workflow that works:

From MoI to texturing/materials, then to animating/rendering... With the most ease possible, just like MoI is easy.

IF I can figure that out without having to go into things like 3ds Max or Bender, I'd be happy and ready to buy. (because I love the way MoI works)

Thanks for any input on that.

Hi Death, it's not a bug in either one, for you to get the behavior you want you need UV coordinates set up and the ones that MoI exports are not suitable for your purposes so you need to set new ones up in Substance Painter.

In the future I would like to make MoI's default exported UV coordinates behave like you want but currently they do not so you need to set that up in your receiving application.

You could also use some of these tools to set up the uv mapping:
UVMapper: http://www.uvmapper.com/
Unwrap3D: http://www.unwrap3d.com/u3d/index.aspx
Unfold3D: http://www.polygonal-design.fr/


> the weird thing is, it works in Tool-bag and the Owlet, so I am confused.

The ones where it works are not using UV mapping and the ones where you are having problems with are dependent on a good UV mapping to be set up.

- Michael

O, OK, I get it. That explain some working , some not...

Thanks for taking the time and helping out this noobie.

All I need then are proggies that do NOT use the UV mapping.

Any suggestions (besides Toolbag and Owlet) for the material assignment and animation/rendering?

Hi Death, yeah I'd think Simlab Composer would be good to check out for rendering. I think they have a version with animation as well.

- Michael

Thanks for the help, I will check out simlab again...

It looks like the substance guys have a real cool new item in the queue: Alchemist, hopefully that will work for materials.

Have a great rest of the night,

Jack

Hi,

As not expert, I tested SP to be curious with your file.
Each style in MOI became a texture in SP.
Then I was able to paint each texture in SP.

Death, have you exported in .obj format ?

The texture is repeated on each face attached with a texture.
Here we see your 2 windows have the same texture (named green in SP because named green in Moi).
Same problem (if this is a problem for your needs) you have same texture on each face of your wall.
So if you don't want same texture on each surface of a single object, you must separate the surface of your objects in MOI and give them different styles (MOI's Styles)





It helped ?

If no, sorry...

Hi Phiro, having a separate material for every surface could work for simple models but it's likely to be inefficient for anything larger. The main way to set things up would be to set up a uvmapping which controls where polygons will paint into a texture map.

If Substance Painter does not have its own tools for setting up UV mapping and expects for it to already be set up, you could use one of the standalone uv mapping tools I linked to above to set it up.

- Michael

Hi Death,

to make your objects paintable in Substance Painter and to make use of all advanced options you will need to unwrap all your objects and assign uv maps to them. There is no way around this. You can do this in a program like Blender (free) which has a good tool set or use specialized software like RizomUV for this. Whatever way you go, unwrapping is a must and comes with a learning curve. On top of this you might have to deal with retopologizing your models depending on your later use case.

Regards,
Sven

Basically (as far as I know) Substance Painter is a tool specifically for painting on UV texture maps. If you don't want to know about or work with UV textures then it's probably not going to be the right tool for you.

- Michael

Okay, I did a quick unwrap of your meshes in Blender (see attached .obj) and some dressing up in Substance Painter. Once you get used to the workflows it's all quick and efficient. This didn't take longer than 20 minutes altogether.

Happy learning :)
Sven

PS: I made three UV maps (one for the wall, one for the windows, and one for the door). To work on them in Substance Painter you have to choose them. Also the orientation of your meshes in MoI is wrong, the wall is lying on the floor, not standing upright. I didn't change that

Hi All,

thanks for the info and help, much appreciated. In the end, it boils down to what Michael said: UV unwrapping.

It seems it takes more time to unwrap than to model something this simple.

I tried the "unwrappers" mentioned, but don't want to go that route. This was just a bare-bones simple test model and it will turn into a nightmare for a complex model, that's for sure.

MoI is great because it it simple and fast to use (besides all the complexity under the hood) and it doens't take a thousand page manual and hundreds of hidden button in some drop-downs to use it. I love this approach and IMHO is the best 3d modeler out there to use if one just wants to model and get things done.

My quest is to find the equivalent in the materials/painting and animation/rendering of the models created.

Unwrapping is going to be too time consuming to be an option for future complex models. What I did find however, is that if you name the materials and set them in MoI, they will come across for some apps to use. It seems however, that Moi only exports the selected colors and the names given to the materials do NOT "stick" to the material selection/definition. When I export in OBJ format some apps, like Armorpaint and SP get the materials (colors) right, but assign the names incorrectly. The windows for example become object1 and object 3, the door object2 and the wall was correctly named.

Anyway, in Owlet one can just drag and drop the materials to the objects and it works fine without any unwrapping or other prep. So it is just a matter of finding the perfect combination of apps to make it all work.

Thank you all for taking the time to respond and help.

What is your guy's workflow and what programs do you use for this, once your modeling is done?

Hi Jack,

> It seems however, that Moi only exports the selected colors and the names given to the materials do
> NOT "stick" to the material selection/definition. When I export in OBJ format some apps, like Armorpaint
> and SP get the materials (colors) right, but assign the names incorrectly. The windows for example
> become object1 and object 3, the door object2 and the wall was correctly named.

There is more than one kind of name label involved, it sounds like you might be getting the different labels kind of confused.

When you export to an .obj file the style assignments in MoI will become material assignments in the .obj file and the styles list will become the materials list.

Separate from materials there is also in many programs a concept of an "object name". You can set this in MoI on an object and it is a separate name from the style assignment and style names.

If your object in MoI was not assigned an object name, MoI will make a generic one like "object 1", "object 2", etc... for the object name property in the exported .obj file.

If you don't want to see those generic names then you would need to assign your own object name inside of MoI. You can assign a name to an object using the properties panel, click on the name line and an "Edit name" dialog will come up. Again, this is separate from the style assignments and style names.



- Michael

if you want really fast quick-and-dirty UVs without much distortion, just in order to be able to use Substance Painter, I would recommend using MODO's atlas projection feature.
That's just one click for each object, then you pack the uvs and you are done.
IMHO this UV mapping is far from perfect (it wastes space), but it might be good enough - the distortion is minimized
I do this all the time in order to get stuff into Substance Painter quickly.


Here you see 4 different sub objects (from a tutorial for MOI that I am working through right now)


Now I do the atlas projection, just one click (while all objects are selected) and we get UVs for everything, but they are overlapping


Now this is the pack dialog


And this is your UV map.


If you up the rez for your textures you might get acceptable results.

Of course you can create multiple UV maps with this method, for each group of objects that you want to handle in Substance Painter individually.

I do not know if Blender or any other OSS has a comparable feature.

Cheers
PS Sorry I wanted to reply to the main thread, not the last answer

Hi Michael,

yeah I guess I overlooked the door and windows rectangle "constructors". The whole wall and door and windows were Boolean "union'd" and named. I must have forgotten to delete the other objects.

Thanks!

Hi HappyWeasel.

Very cool!

But I can't afford Modo, way out of my price-league...

Anyway, pretty cool, it looks like it does what the Virtual Reality Rizom Unfold program does, only it's built into Modo, quite nice!

I tried the RizomUV program and it is very nice and easy to use. But I am trying to avoid the UV unwrapping completely.

It seems that so far the Owlet and Simlab are the candidates for that, they need no further mods of the MoI object to add materials to it.

Thanks for your very nice detailed info, I appreciate the time you guys waste on helping me out.

I am getting closer to the workflow solution I am seeking with every advice I get.

Thanks!

I think there's also a function in Blender, something like "Average UV islands" that could probably process the MoI-generated UV coordinates to make them work better for Substance Painter.

- Michael