Blender 2.8 paint mode support for multiple image types at once

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
#21

Hi all, Substance user here.

Yes, Substance Painter does its magic with UV maps, and most of the workflow is based on mixing layers with grayscale masks (pretty much what @Michael_W described above), so actual “painting” typically happens to the mask texture most of the time, and not directly to N channels. This way the whole workflow remains non-destructive: amending a grayscale mask is way easier than erasing stuff across roughness+basecolor+height channels.

What makes substance painter special is its “smart masks” (e.g. dirt, soft edges, dirt from ground, etc, etc) which are in fact a simple-ish mix of some of the baked textures (curvature map, world position map, etc). Aaand… to my surprise Blender has excellent support for those as well with Geometry node (e.g. pointiness output which is basically Substance Painter’s curvature map).

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And, of course, SP offers a lot of procedural textures, which I miss a lot in Blender. Overall, I find the approach of painting the mask texture fairly acceptable — basically because I don’t actually do too much painting with SP :wink:

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#22

Something along these lines?

I personally think there should be a push to have substance/3DC capability in blender. I believe the tech is in there 80%. Not that I think it’s easy to go rest of the way, just think it’s a shame not to reach that goal as well (alongside all the other goals blender’s got lined).
Definitely something that is not gonna be on the list until 2.8 is polished. But some time down the road, maybe in a year or so.
Just feel it’d be a shame not to have a comprehensible PBR texturing tool within blender as well.

Edit:
Shite, didn’t realize this was an old thread.

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#23

hey did you complete your addon, If yes could you plz share with me…i am in desperate need of multi-texturing ability

#24

It’s still far from complete… and everything that is viewport related are just dummy functions. Just some nodes and the engine are almost done.

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#25

ohk, ohk, I was actually looking for Painting PBR on my model.

#26

Keep an eye on https://armorpaint.org/ for Blender.

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#27

screw addons !!!, they always end up in the dirt becos of changes in the API

another feature that should be there is Atlas baking

selecting all objects/edit is really not something efficient with many objects and high quality rendering

blender painting system is middle age compared to what’s on the market today

I wrote a script to paint textures on UV maps >10 years ago and it was doing pretty much what blender does today

this is ludicrous

#28

Hey all,

If anyone is still interested in this concept, I have recently developed an addon called PBR Painter for Blender v2.9+ that lets you do this exact thing, using a layer-based approach.

The addon will be available shortly for purchase.

Would love to see it being used and get feedback to improve future versions.

EDIT: I’ve decided to make some more improvements to the addon prior to release so I’ll link it when ready.

1 Like