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Multiple mats with different texture layers in paint room ?


JarienSkywall
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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:

  1. I export an FBX from Maya, with "embed media" toggled on.
  2. I make a new file in 3D Coat and choose "Paint UV Mapped Mesh (Per-Pixel)."
  3. I tried multiple times with different import settings (see step 4).
  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.
  5. 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.
  6. Back in 3D Coat, the texture reloads and layers for the first material shows up fine.
  7. 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.
  8. 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!

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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:SubstancePainterMultiMatFunction.thumb.gif.235f32050bbfd9051c7d4f6c27b6b811.gif

 

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.

3DCoatMultiMatFunction.thumb.gif.2d1824990d59045d41f38072dd3bab73.gif

 

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It's a bit of a manual workaround, you right.

3DC and SP have different working methods and I still don't know which one is better.

In SP the process is more automatic but less flexible, in 3DC it is more open but needs a previous planning...

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  • 10 months later...
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I had the same question. I'm glad it was posted.
Yeah, a bit of a  "work around" and it would still look like an object's texture contains the layers in that folder. What would make sense, I think (and I'd like your feedback), is to have the layer's palette correspond with the UV (in the paint object's palette).

So, say I import 2 objects into my 3D Coat scene from Max. For simplicity let's call them A and B.
In the paint objects palette you see the objects:  A and B
 As is now, if I import a PSD for A's UVs and another, separately for B's,  in the layers palette, it gangs them all up into one long layer list, looking like they all belong to one object. That's a mess.
Now, if you had a drop down option on the layers palette to select your object A or B, then we'd only see the layers that logically correspond to A or B. No confusion, no mess.
Is that doable for Pilgway to implement?  Example mock up:
image.png.04e038111519d33b131a94505e030ccd.png
or I guess, even better:
image.png.ea96eaaa2206c666132bcd9d22a56210.png

 

Edited by rgarcia
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  • 2 months later...

Is how Spainter works, 3DCoat has a different way of doing it. The layers are created in each smart material, in this way the material creation is not limited to each model but rather smart material. Both solutions have their pros and cons.

bug.thumb.PNG.dfd0f4aa2d96533288dd24d7c5ce62e8.png

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  • Carlosan changed the title to Multiple mats with different texture layers in paint room ?
  • 6 months later...

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