How do you 'update' an already existing texture with new work on a mesh?

[Feld_IV]

Maybe you can see what I’m trying to do here.

I have a texture atlas I’m setting up of little textures for things like posters and such; what I’m trying to do is that as I create more posters in Blender and import those meshes in Substance Painter to work on them, I want the textures I eventually create on them to slot into a texture atlas I’m continually updating.

Essentially;

-Make poster in Blender, UV unwrap, etc

-Import the mesh AND the master texture in Substance Painter, do my thing, the mesh is already UV unwrapped within the bounds of where I want its textures to sit on the atlas

-Export the texture with atlas updated

What happens instead is that when I export a texture in Substance it just makes a whole new file. What I want instead is the image above to continually update as I add. Is this possible? Is this possible to work around if Substance can’t do it?

[Richard_Culver]

We usually do this by using the same file name and overwriting it.

Keep backups of course.

When you are done in substance, rename it to match the file name you are using and then copy it over the original in its folder.

Make backups of the original files!

Another way is to simply replace the image in Blender with the new one.

[Feld_IV]

Well, sure, but the problem is that when you export textures in Substance Painter it doesn’t just let you pick a file and overwrite it; it looks like this

So basically I can’t just say 'I want to save this over the already existing ‘poster.png’, Substance Painter just makes a new poster_Alpha.png/poster_BaseColor, etc etc

[Richard_Culver]

Yes I know.

I am talking about copying and renaming files after you export them.

Or you could simply rename the file to what substance names it, then direct Blender to your Substance export location and replace it.

Then each time it is changed and you export will be the same name again and update.

It’s a simple workflow we use all the time.

[Feld_IV]

Well, sure, but what’s happening is this;

If you can tell, from the position the texture is on the viewport, it’s where the UV’s are on the ‘posters’ image above. I imported over the ‘posters’ image to this project in Substance, but not only is the rest of the image not appearing, which hey, I guess it doesn’t matter so much, but when I go and export it, it’s just the image of JUST the texture/mesh, i.e.

this

The end result of what I’m looking for overall is a texture sheet that looks like this; (badly mocked up)