Substance paint on a curve?

Support Materials and Textures
#1

Hi folks.

It’s well overdue, but I’ve just been getting started with Substance Painter. There are a couple of projects that need bringing out of the ‘art’ category! So far the results are a lot better than expected.

But, I’ve just come up against something I can’t find a fix for. In this particular project there are a few pipes with are curves, locked to constraints and the ‘jiggle’ about during the animation, these are the only soft body objects in the scene.

How do I get the data back and forth to Substance? Do I temporarily turn the curves into mesh, unwrap, then send to Substance? Do I just bring the texture back into Blender as if I was working with a mesh? How will the material move with a soft object?

I could spend hours trying to figure this out so I thought I’d ask for tips.

Many thanks.

#2

You can set curves in Blender to auto-generate UVs. It’ll be a rectangular UV chunk filling the entire 0-1 space that covers the entire length of your curve geometry. Mapped evenly from root to tip: left to right border in UV space.

You can then convert your curve to geo, paint in SP and reapply the result in Blender to curve or geo objects. Be aware that (despite a longstanding request of mine) textures applied to curve objects only show up in Eevee not in Workbench/simple shaded mode.

If you change your curve in Blender afterwards by modifying the number of CVs or their distance to one another, the UVs will shift around, always evenly spaced. And naturally the texture will stretch when applied to a soft object.

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