Is it possible to create and alpha from an object inside of blender?

[sneeman]

Hey guys, I hope your day is going well. I’ve been using blender for years, however I had a question that I couldn’t find the answer to because it was buried under “how to use” alphas.

I was wondering if it was possible to create an alpha inside blender from a basic object, or sculpted surface, like in Zbrush.

Say I have an object like this, and I wanted to turn in into an alpha for use in substance painter:

Well, normally I would go into Photoshop, make a rectangle, have the two sides come in at a gradient, etc, until I got the results I wanted, and then I could use it for painting.

However, if I could directly create this in blender, or, if there were some sort of pipeline that just had me exporting a map of sorts, that would speed up my workflow exponentially.

Anyway, thank you guys taking a moment to read this, and if you guys do know any quicker ways to make alphas, please let me know! There’s always a very large chance that I’m simply repeating bad practice, and that there’s better ways to do things out there!

[Secrop]

not really sure about what you want to do, but if your question is if it is possible to create brush textures within blender, than the answer is yes.

if it’s an alpha texture or a displacement or just color, it’s just a matter of storing the correct information in specific channels and formats.

I don’t really know how brushes in SP work, but as long you can use pngs or tiffs as brushes textures, then there is no problem at all.
All you need to do is to setup the camera (ortho/perspective, etc). Choose the information that you want to use in the render layer ( color, depth, normals,…)
And save it in a convinient format.