Homebrewed replacement for Substance Painter - Substance Projection System - just sharing progress
So i am finally near the end of developing my substance projection system as i call it - a few years back i had textured an alien dog model and i was still learning back then so i had to redo some parts of the geometry for rigging to work better and so i used Substance Painter to paint the model with some materials i made in substance designer and sadly i had to repaint the same thing for 3-4 times which sucked all the joy out of the process because setting up substance painter with a lot of PBR channels each time, complex texturing and having to redo it once something changes just sucks - and so now that i know houdini i just remade substance painter in houdini in copernicus via vex, python and opencl. So far what i made is a pdg based tool that allows you to
- Set up any geometry and switch it at will with UDIMS
- Set up Texture channels, base colour, mettallic... whatever you need
- Set up layers and groups(folders) pretty much like in photoshop/substance painter standard layer + folders worlfow a bit clunky due to limitations of multiparms. There is a simple noninteractive visualizer for showing the hierarchy of layers
- The layers can be set to only affect specific texture channels
- 3 projection modes thus far - 2d texture, planar, and just finished spherical today, gonna be finishing on cyllindrical tomorrow, all with their own falloff fields
- Load textures by user specified pattern
- Set up working Animation globaly and per layer with 6 playback modes
- Tiling settings per each layer
- And toggle for compacting all texture channels into one final .exr automatically
I think that's pretty much it for now, i haven't made paint brush mode and geometry group selection per layers but that's gonna come some time soon. I also haven't set up any vierwport handles.
Ah also there is working preview for viewing the result of the projection of all layers per selected channel by using the controls paramters if compacted exr is on or clicking through workitems
I am still working on it but i how it will help me find some sort of job. Basically for texturing stuff for my projects i want to utilize substance designer -> touch designer to export(i know you can use marmoset or substance playback but i am used to using touch for exporting flat textures) and now i can project them with animation and with easily switching geometry when i want to.
The issue i still have is houdini process is holding on to the process specifically some texture cops or viewport and i haven't yet figured out how to make it let go of the process and the files - win32 permission error process can't access the file due to it being busy with some other process which i know is houdini so i'll be looking through the houdini python doucmentation for figuring how to purge the houdini process later on so yeah.
I did this thing solo in about 2-3 months or so.
Ah and i am also not used to making HDAs so that will also be some time later
