JarienSkywall

Thank you, Carlosan. It's a bit of a manual workaround but easy enough and effectively would achieve what I wanted!

Was the issue with the Paint Room's Shift Tool not working ever fixed? I know this post is from almost 4 years ago but I'm experiencing a very similar bug. The Shift tool in the viewport is erasing, no matter if I choose Smudge, Pinch, or Expand. However, in the UV texture editor view, the Shift tool does nothing. It's not erasing, but it's not smudging/pinching/expanding either. It simply has no effect. Changing the Degree of the Shift tool makes no difference to the Shift tool's incorrect behavior (unless I set degree to 0 which makes the Shift tool do nothing). Switching between Connective Picking and Volume Based makes no difference to the Shift tool's incorrect behavior. The problem seems to be a program setting. The Shift tool worked fine earlier and suddenly it's not. The Shift tool now behaves incorrectly in any file that I open. I looked at all the settings in Edit -> Preference and nothing in there appears to have anything to do with the Shift tool.

I got some help on the 3DCoat discord group, and it sounds like the functionality that I wanted does not exist, at least at the time of this writing. I'm following up here in case someone else is searching for the same thing in the future. I recorded some gifs showing the Substance Painter's functionality that I wanted to replicate in 3DCoat, and3D Coat's behavior in the same circumstance. Substance Painter: Each object has its own material, texture, and UV set. Each texture has have several paint layers. The paint layers of each texture/material/object are completely independent of the others: 3DCoat: I have multiple UV sets but each UV set uses the same texture and layers as the other UV sets. This isn't work-blocking, but it means that with 3 different UV sets I have 3x the amount of layers in one file, and it gets confusing to keep track of. It would be nice if I could automatically hide the layers that were not being used for whatever UV set I was painting on. One good thing about the way 3DCoat does it is that you can seamlessly paint from one UV set to another, whereas in Substance Painter since each UV set gets its own dedicated material and texture layer stack, you can't cross a paint stroke from one UV set to another.

Is there a way in the paint room to have multiple materials, each with their own layers and textures, similar to how Substance Painter handles importing a mesh that has multiple materials assigned? I have a character model with one material assigned to the hair, one material assigned to the head, and another material assigned to the rest of the body. Each material has its own texture. I started basic colors and painting in Substance Painter and Photoshop, and I want to do the rest in 3D Coat. Here is my process and how 3D Coat handles it: I export an FBX from Maya, with "embed media" toggled on. I make a new file in 3D Coat and choose "Paint UV Mapped Mesh (Per-Pixel)." I tried multiple times with different import settings (see step 4). All the textures in 3D Coat are gray. I use the ctrl+P "send to Photoshop" function to add my previous textures back into the 3D Coat textures. I get a prompt saying "select UV set to export." If I have toggled on "import tiles as UV sets" when I created the file, then the materials/UV sets are renamed to 1001, 1002, and 1012. If I have toggled off "import tiles as UV sets" when I created the file, then the materials/UV sets retained their original name. If I have toggled off "import tiles as UV sets" when I created the file and toggled off "treat materials as separate textures," then whatever I paint on one part of the mesh also gets painted onto a different part of the mesh. So obviously this one is the wrong choice. I pick the material/UV set in 3D Coat, then In Photoshop I paste my original textures into my "Layers.psd" generated by 3D Coat, then save and close Layers.psd. Back in 3D Coat, the texture reloads and layers for the first material shows up fine. I repeat the process for my second material. If I give the second material a different number of layers than the first material, then in 3D Coat all the objects that received the first material disappear. They do still have visibility toggled on in the "paint objects" panel. If I give the second material the same number of layers than the first material, then in 3D Coat the objects that receive both materials stay present. In the "texture editor" panel, I can still toggle between materials in the dropdown, and the texture editor shows the proper texture for these. But they all share the same layers. So it appears that 3D Coat allows multiple materials, but they all must use the same textures and layers for those textures. This is not ideal - I'd love to be able to only use the layers I need for each material, and to name each layer appropriately. Is there a way to do this that I'm missing? Thanks!