Hi
Has anbody has experience with using substance painter and combining it with blender?
How to do it?
Yes, here.
Killer combo!
What exactly do you want to combine?
The PBRs or Scenes?
For the PBRs itâs pretty simple, really.
Substance Painter spits out Diffuse, Metallic, Roughness, Normal and Ambient Occlusion Maps, which you can connect to the principled BSDF Node.
It even supports UDIMs
Thanks
How to save it in substance paineter?
All substance painter will do is export out the image maps of what you have âpaintedâ. Usually those will be PNG files (normal map in OpenGL format, as that is what Blender uses) and then you plug those into a shader setup, much like the video above in Blender.
So outside of Blender, my first question would be what do you know about Painter? If the answer is pretty much nothing, then maybe first start with a couple of basic tutorials and then after that try taking a simple model (say monkey head) from Blender to Substance and then textures back into Blender.
I think there is a way to export a mesh from substance painter, but I think you would mostly need to only export the textures.
The important points to use the two applications are:
- UV unwrap your model (properly)
- Add different âMaterialsâ in Blender
- Export from Blender into FBX or OBJ (or anything else Substance can read)
- Texture in Painter
- Export textures from Painter
- Put exported textures into Blender like any other texture
Note that #2 is one type of workflow. You can also only put one material on your whole model, and I donât know which approach is better.
But maybe you are looking for an explanation of the texture export dialogue and all the different textures it exports? I canât offer much help there as I am not familiar with that, but I can say you will probably need only BaseColor, Roughness, and Normal (Height?). Maybe Metallic.
Yeah, technically you can, but would be a bit pointless, since it would largely just be the FBX or OBJ file that one imported into Painter to start with. No real need too, as it wouldnât have any modifier setups or extra âBlenderâ type data that one would have with the initial Blender file. So yeah, just the textures are usually exported.
It can be a long list of possible texture files, somewhat dependent on what exactly one is exporting for and selects at the time.
Usually there is the Colour, Roughness and Normal maps. Chances are there is also a Height map, which for Blender is either used as a displacement map or I mostly combine it with the Normal map and feed both into the normal socket, otherwise things donât always look right.
As you say, there will be a Metal map for anything that is metallic. If nothing on the model is metal, then that can be skipped.
A couple of other possible common ones are Emission map, if you have anything that glows or should emit some light (think windows on a building at night time). And an Opacity map, which would basically be a transparency or alpha mask in Blender.
For each object you use substance painter for, you need ALL these nodes like in the video?
It canât be true???
Not necessarily, no. In the video he added nodes for control.
Except for Normal and Height you can just plug the Image node into the appropriate slot.
It just depends on how much additional control you want. Technically if youâre satisfied with your painted maps then you shouldnât need additional control, but the options are there.
is there a way to re-use the nodes because they just use another image or is the same nodes required for each object I use substance painter for?
Each material has its own node setup, which lives it its own space per material.
You can sort of reuse nodes. After youâve set up a material you can duplicate the material, rename it, then change out the images.
You can also copy/paste nodes from one material to another.
Those would be the easiest solutions, until you get into either writing a python script that sets up a node network automatically, or you find one online.
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Are there maybe add-ons for blender that can make copying nodes or duplicating material fast?
Iâm not sure as Iâve never searched for one. But it would surprise me more if there isnât with the plethora of scripts and add-ons available.
For most of the maps that get exported from Painter using a fairly standard naming setup, this already exists.
With Node Wrangler enabled (which it always should be) if you select a Principled BSDF node and press Shift-Ctrl-T and then in the file box select ALL of the image texture files that where exported from Painter for that model, Blender should add all the image nodes, included the Mapping and Coordinate node and connect them all up automatically.
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Awesome!!! Thank you so much for this tip 
Youâre welcome.
If it happens to miss an image or two due to file naming, you can actually correct that in the addon preferences.
It uses those tags to check within the file name for each image to know what itâs meant to be used for and hence how it connects it all up in the shader editor.
Most of the Painter export templates will just match that anyway.
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A.w.e.s.o.m.e !!!