So I’m looking at Substance Painter and from what I can see it’s really useful. My main question about it is how to painting process works exactly. Because whenever I see people using it they are painting directly onto the highpoly model. This confuses me because I thought you were supposed to have a uv-unrapped lowpoly model before you could begin texture painting. And even then you could only paint onto the lowpoly model not the highpoly.
Substance Painter allows you to paint on a low poly or high poly, but in both cases you will need UVs.
Okay then what about game models? I’ve seen people paint on the highpoly game characters and then use those textures on the lowploly version of the characters. How is this possible? Wouldn’t the UV layout be different?
Their youtube videos explain how it works. And UV maps are really cool in substance painter as the save file remembers everything you do so that allows it to redraw stuff for you on a newer version of the uvunwrap/model. And all this happens nearly instantly. It’s mindblowing.
Really? I should look more into that. I’ve only really seen the time-lapse stuff so I never knew how the particulars worked.
It works by reprojecting the strokes painted in the 3d view, so you can paint on the model, replace the mesh with another mesh with changed UVs, and the strokes will reproject onto the new mesh. It only works if you paint in the 3d view though, you can’t reproject strokes painted in the 2d view. Technically if the meshes are similar you can paint on a highpoly and reproject on the lowpoly mesh, but if they are too different in world space things will get messed up.