[Solved] New to Modeling/Texturing; Having a lot of trouble with Substance Painter

[DragonBreath75]

I'll try to explain this as best as I can because I don't fully understand the depths of 3D modeling and texturing.

To start, I am trying to create an alt helm for Tennogen by modeling in Blender. I have the low poly and high poly models made, and I'm currently trying to apply color maps so I can properly have them tintable. I am getting into Substance Painter and have baked my textures and am now attempting to color my tints with help of the provided Evolution PBR shader and the Base Setup texture layer settings from DE. I am currently stuck though because I can't quite grasp how this stuff is supposed to be set up in Substance Painter. I should mention that I've been trying to follow a Tennogen guide by Hydroxate here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FlEvFUp3Dk which is not doing me much good because he kind of rushes through some steps I'm stuck on.

In this guide, he imports his models just fine and bakes his textures. My first issue was that my ID map just wouldn't bake. I still don't have a full understanding of how the ID map should really look. All I know is that with this setup, I can really make it any color I want because the color can be tinted with the shader in Substance. This may be the root of the problem, but I could not get Substance to properly identify color materials on my imported model in order to properly bake an ID map, so I painted a makeshift ID map as a test in Blender. I exported the png of it, and imported it to Substance and stuck it on the ID map slot and it shows up just fine on the model when I view the ID map. Below is the little scribble I made on it just to test to see if it works in Substance.

My next issue is that I just don't know how to get these layers set up correctly. From what I can see in Hydroxate's guide, he is able to take the colors from his ID map with the mask color selection and it appears just fine on the model. When I do it, the mask doesn't change anything on the model. The only visible change I see is when I put a fill layer below tint 3 and add the color selection to the mask. When I do this, the metallic properties of that tint come through and you can see the red area turn shiny on the model, but that's it.

A way I found to actually change the colors of each tint was to add a fill layer underneath the tint folders and make the fill the color I want, but I know this isn't right. In Hydroxate's guide, he was able to change the colors all he wanted with the mask color selection and the shader color selection without having to change any of the layer colors.

And when I try to change the colors on the shader for all of the tints, only tint 3 changes something visually. I know these shader tints are supposed to directly change the colors of the tints but nothing really seems to connect. All it does is change the color of the whole model, as you can see by the previous screen shots, it's set to a grey-blue color on tint 3 in the screenshot below.

Sorry if there is any confusion in interpreting this post, I'm just so stumped and just need a push in the right direction. Any help is appreciated and feel free to ask me questions.

 

Edited October 7, 2019 by DragonBreath75
Solved

[lukinu_u]

I don't understand where the issue come from, so I'm just gonna summarize the process and hope it helps.

First, go to the TextureSet Settings and add the User0 et User1 channels as RGB8 and L8


From there, anything painted in these channels should be your tints : red/green/blue of user0 being tint0/1/2 and user1 being tint4. To make sure it works, add a new fill layer, go to Properties - Fill and uncheck everything exept user0 and try with red/green/blue to see the colors selected on the shader options work properly, be careful to have user1 uncheck as iit will override the user0.


If everything is working, you can now create one layer for each tint, put a mask on the layer and define the area colored by each tint.

One important thing to note is the higher number is the tint, the more it will override other colors, so a white user1 will make everything colored the tint3, even if if other colors are there as well. In your case where everything is tint3, it's possible that the very bottom layer as a white user1 which make other colors not visible. To check, you can go is Viewer setting > Mode > Solo > and select whatever channel you want (user1 in this case).

[DragonBreath75]

4 hours ago, lukinu_u said:

From there, anything painted in these channels should be your tints : red/green/blue of user0 being tint0/1/2 and user1 being tint4. To make sure it works, add a new fill layer, go to Properties - Fill and uncheck everything exept user0 and try with red/green/blue to see the colors selected on the shader options work properly, be careful to have user1 uncheck as iit will override the user0.

 

Thank you for replying! Your explanation has helped me understand it a bit better, but I'm still having trouble. I think this might be the root of the problem but I can't say for certain. I've done what you said above and the model appears blank when I set the fill layer to only user0. I changed the uniform color to see if that would change anything but it did not. 

[SpicyDinosaur]

https://discord.gg/blender

[DragonBreath75]

I managed to figure it out. I just needed to properly get my fill layers set up below my tint layers, and then set them to their proper channels like user0 and user1 so they weren't blocking each other out.