FINALLY! Substance Painter has UDIMS: How to

[@MichaelWilde3d]

I'd love to know if you've used it and what you think? I know I won't be switching from Mari but for £16 a month, I know I will be using Substance more. Also, I made an instagram account a week or so back! Check that out here :) instagram.com/michaelwildeVFX/

[@AndrewBrowne3d]

Hey Michael. It's been a while 😁. Don't know if you know, but I just bought substance for £120 on Steam (and Designer). Perpetual licenses (forever!!!). No need to rent for £16 or whatever a month, otherwise it's £192 a year.

[@MichaelWilde3d]

I did have a look with that but you didn’t get updates after a while or something? It didn’t seem quite worth it to me. Although I did consider it for a few days. I don’t use substance too much so £15 here and there isn’t too bad for me!

[@AndrewBrowne3d]

@@MichaelWilde3d The update is available through steam though. I'm running it no probs.

[@No_Plastic]

Fundamentally Mari is much more advanced and leaning towards to more artistic endeavors rather than instant gratification that the painter offers and you can tell the difference in the final versions as well. Yes it is a milestone for substance, but what's next? 3D space texturing is not going to change as it's the core architecture of the painter, that alone pretty much puts Mari ahead in film production not to mention the nodes system! It's an improvement in speed that Mari needs and proper baking of geo-channels for it to stay on top for many years to come. Come on Foundry! :)

[@pepnoi]

I've been going through the posts pretty quickly and I don't know if someone finally answered the question if there is a way to combine the different meshmap files shared by Udim. Thanks a lot for your work

[@romiokasuga]

As a workaround for your issue, i would propbably bake a Id map to separate the three materials :) for instance i ll have too models, one with one material (the one that i'll keep in painter) and the other with tree lambert each one of a specific flat color, and the rest you know, baking an id map in substance painter. may be it's worth trying

[@crediblemulk4638]

Been using it for a while, I really like it, pluse Designer is also great. I was also a bit stumped about some of the stuff, but this video helped. Thanks

[@andriilebid8137]

Yeah, the biggest issue with Painter (and it is not going to change) is it records brush strokes in 3d space rather then uv space (like Mari), so basically if your model get changed (which often happens in production) - you're screwed. Moving to mari (even for gamedev purposes) - makes the pipeline that more convenient. You lose all the neat semi-automatic hard surface stuff which is fantastic in Painter, also good integration with Designer (which is very good), but working in Mari using all possible bakes from say Marmorset you can mimic all that stuff pretty much as well. Not as simple as I'd want, but the this single thing with strokes is a big letdown for me really.

[@MichaelWilde3d]

That explains a lot, I wasn’t actually aware of the 3D space in substance but I was confused why when I swapped a mesh the strokes moved and didn’t stay on the identical UVs, thanks so much for telling me that!!

[@andriilebid8137]

​@@MichaelWilde3d There's a thread regarding this buried somewhere on allegorithmic forums. It has to do with the fact that painter by design was created around the feature being "resolution independant", so it saves "brush strokes" (in 3D space, sadly) rather then actual " rasterized paint" (or paint buffer?) you apply to your model, so it can recreate higher/lower res maps by a single button press (that is, also taking into account all the information like brush settings, alpha etc.). Which sounds neat, but is not worth it at all, if you take into account all the mess with even ever so slightly changed geometry. I think this comes down to Painter's architecture due to hardware limitation at that time (and Painter is still painfully slow with everything bigger then 4k), but I also still wonder why this isn't a bigger topic in the community or why most people are not aware of this.

[@andriilebid8137]

@@MichaelWilde3d btw you intro to Mari 4 from the foundry webpage helped a lot, thank You so much. Keep up the good work!

[@iAdrian1997]

thanks for the quick rundown!

[@Oblivionator100]

So I"ve worked in the game design pipeline for a long time. The reason why substance uses the workflow where it saves different materials as different maps is because it was made with real time rendering in mind. In real time rendering, you wouldn't normally use more than a few materials on a single model, as this takes up more on screen memory, reducing efficiency in loading. Instead, the material is computed by using the different maps as information telling the engine what to do with simulated light when it bounces or is absorbed by specific pixels on a map. This is why we use PBR shaders for game engine workflows, as PBR's can calculate a metal looking shader on the same map as a diffuse looking shader.

[@MichaelWilde3d]

Okay, good to know! I don't understand how that is more efficent having all the info baked into a single map rather than exporting multiple? I can just use a metallic map along with the roughness and colour etc to define all the different materials in 3 single maps rather than one per texture set

[@Oblivionator100]

@@MichaelWilde3d it has to do with how much the engine has to load into the scene. If you have say a phong shader, a diffuse shader and a refractive shader, the engine would call up the shader information, and every map associated with each individual shader. If you use one shader, you only have to call up a single set of maps. In vfx its fine to do multiple shaders, but since its real time in games, you want as few files to be called as possible when loading a scene. Having UDIMM support is a real game changer for those of us developing maps with substance. It means we dont have to reintegrate all the texture sets to one map set anymore.

[@eternalsnows6071]

It's a great update and seems to work well. I'm torn between Mari and SP. Painting is very smooth in SP and I don't enjoy having to take the time to bake strokes over and over in Mari. But Mari feels much more robust overall and I love the node system. Also, I really don't get why SP's export settings are so oddly complicated. What's with the dragging layers to little boxes and having to pick which channels you want? In Mari you just click export and it brings up a pretty standard save window with all options clearly laid out.

[@andriilebid8137]

re. Painter exporting - it's not as complicated as some'd think, just spend some time with it and it'll become natural, there are several good explanations on the net. Making your own preset and going with just that is a simple way to do things YOUR way. That being said, presets are also there because of different game engines, renderers or what not are using different ggx for their shading, so by having all that Painter tries to save you some headache for your particular need. As it even applies some curves to resulting maps (figured out by community or other means) to get your end look much closer to what you see in Painter's viewport.

[@VFXforfilm]

Love the Mari panic from The Office ;)

[@sams_3d_stuff]

Awesome, thank you!

[@DragonFlairr]

the issue at the end has become a huge problem for the current project that i am working on, because it creates duplicates the textures wont go into ue4 properly as there are multiple of the same tile. i am very lost and not entirely sure what to do now

[@MichaelWilde3d]

Yer it's a bit fucked, I'm not sure why there's no way to compile them - it seems like a real oversight on their half. I always just make sure to use one shader when importing to avoid it, otherwise I would compile them in Mari

[@sys2146]

Great Overview, Thanks! For me Mari is still the way to go. It's a bit like After Effects compared to Nuke. While AE is very easy and quick to use, especially for beginners, the highend stuff still get's done in Nuke. One last note from a non-native english speaker, you're too FAST! :)

[@Luxalpa]

As a non-native speaker, I love his speed though :/

[@jichihuang]

How can I export all UDIMS from sp to ps and still keep all layers?

[@scarabrae]

Yeah, long time a coming. Looking forward to getting used to it.

[@platinumpineapple9943]

Can anyone help me UV a complex car? I suck at them, whats the next step in getting a complex model into substance painter?

[@DanijelTeofilovic]

Can you show me the model? Try researching program called RizomUV, it makes UV layout fun :)

[@bricksandwalls1291]

What is this version of substance painter??.. 2020???

[@VFXforfilm]

Curious what do you see lacking compared to say Mari?

[@MichaelWilde3d]

The projection tools are awful as are its handling of important images in general, and Mari's node system really beats it hands down in most painting aspects apart from procedurals and materials

[@No_Plastic]

@@MichaelWilde3d Nodes FTW!

[@VFXforfilm]

Michael Wilde figured that. Hopefully Adobe will get them there. This is a good first step.

[@nickzardiashvili624]

Louise Belcher!

[@rafaelmartin3D]

What versión is it?

[@MichaelWilde3d]

I'm on the subscription so it's just the latest 2020 version in there which appear to be 6.2.0

[@amirhossein-kh4kb]

whit this are we still need mari for movies ??????????/

[@MichaelWilde3d]

I don't see it going away anytime soon, but it does make Substance more appealing

[@Iknowvfx]

Substance will catch up to/surpass Mari....Foundry is atrocious with updates (I say this as a Nuke Compositor) Also...prices...part of the reason I'm slowly switching to Resolve Studio. Mocha/SynthEyes can do everything else. Kind of like people who hate Blender....well Blender gets developed faster than every other 3d program and there's an addon for whatever your heart desires.

[@MichaelWilde3d]

Yer my opinion is changing for sure the more I use it, but it's just not there yet - but hey, at the rate they're going who knows in 3 years! You're right on The Foundry's pricing, it's something I complain about all the time, if they want to charge that much then they should at least have a monthly option. Highway robbery considering what other software costs, I'm very glad I don't need to use Nuke. If Mari were more popular maybe it would be cheaper, but it can't get more popular having such a high level to entry so it's a self fulfilling prophecy - all while it hemorrhages users to Substance 🤷‍♂️

[@louismelancon79]

can you clone accross udims? if not then its totally useless!! how you want to fix your seams... i got half aroused for a minute... back to mari..

[@reachingeric]

This dude need to slow down

[@MichaelWilde3d]

I pack it full of info to make the most concise and shortest videos possible, thankfully if that's an issue you can pause as you go, change the speed or rewatch to your hearts content!