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Texturing in Substance Painter

Texturing in Substance Painter

Table of Contents

Summary

This document details the workflow of texturing in Substance Painter with SYNK, highlighting essential steps to properly create maps and apply shading to assets. At the end of the process we generate bitmaps which can then be assigned to meshes in the Texture Assignment step.

Starting the task

Ftrack

In order to start working on the texture of your asset, you will first need to:

  1. Make sure you’re logged in to Ftrack connect, which is a standalone app.

  1. Travel to the texturing or texture assignment task of the asset you want to work on.

  1. Launch the SYNK Substance Painter action.

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A version of Substance Painter which includes the SYNK Pipeline will now launch automatically.

Substance Painter

Once Painter opens, you will be greeted by a window that will allow you to select which version of the file you want to work with.

Open the version you want to work with or create a new version.

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The most important tab is the Work tab:

Both options are supported by the pipeline. It is down to the artist to choose which workflow they prefer to work with.

You can now start texturing.

Supported Texture Names

SYNK requires a strict tag to be set at the end of the map name.

  • [CustomTextureName]_[Tag]

    • NiceCubeAsset_BaseColor

    • NiceCubeAsset_Normal

    • NiceCubeAsset_Height

Map Type

Required tag

Color

BaseColor, Diffuse

MaskMap

MaskMap

Normal

Normal

Emissive

Emissive

SSS

SSS

Thickness

Thickness

Transmission

Transmission

Opacity

Opacity

AO

AO

Displacement

Height, Depth and Displacement

Best pratices

The following points are best practices we recommend a texturing artist to follow.

Keep the Layers window clean

This is a pretty standard thing to do but is always better to mention it. There’s no sanity check on how to organize the Layer window so please keep it clean and organized so other artists can take over your work at anytime with little to no effort.

Keep it procedural

Avoid hand painting as much as possible. Use Fill, Filters or Generators to masks layers in a non destructive way that will make retakes much faster in the long run.

image-20250206-104256.png
Example of a Layer window

Texturing for Unity

Painter to Unity shading comparison

The following page is for reference if you’re unfamiliar with using Unity. As the viewport of Painter is basically a realtime engine too, the difference between both software is minimal.

Substance Painter to Unity Shading Comparison

Skin

Unity requires some extra maps than the regular SSS map. It requires 3 maps to properly work:

  • Subsurface Mask: Mask out the bounce light on the lit side of the object. 0 no light is scattered, 1 a lot of light is scattered.

    char_Merlin_A_tex_v001_1001_SSS.png

  • Transmission: Mask out the transmission coming through on the dark side of the object. 0 no light comes through, 1 light goes fully through.

    17928f26-fcf7-49a7-8d26-5f2e84cba226.png

  • Thickness: Determine how thick the object is. A value of 0 is very thin and 1 is thick

    char_Merlin_A_tex_v001_1001_Thickness.1001.png

By default the channels and the output template from Painter doesn’t have them so you have to do some setup in the project file to properly export them.

Add extra channels

  1. Go to the texture Set Settings window and click on the “+“ button

    image-20250326-142201.png

  2. Select a User channel that is still available. This will add it to the list of channels

  3. Double click on the User channel and rename it.

  4. Do this twice to add the Thickness and Transmission channels.

    image-20250326-142508.png

Add Output Maps

  1. Create a new Gray output

  2. Assign the corresponding inputs

    1. Subsurface Mask > Scattering

    2. Thickness > User# channel that matches the custom channel

    3. Transmission > User# channel that matches the custom channel

image-20250326-143106.png

How to mask geometry with Geometry masks

Geometry masks is a feature available since Substance Painter 2021 (so, it is available in the SYNK pipe). The geometry mask isn’t a replacement to the layer mask but can make the project file more performant as it do exclude the layer to affect all the geometry. For more in depth information please read the official documentation. https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-painter/interface/layer-stack/geometry-mask.html

In your Layers tab, at the right end of each layer, you can see an empty dotted square.
When clicking it, Painter will open a Properties - Geometry Mask tab.

image-20250617-095210.png

The next selection box allows you to essentially filter which geometry this layer will be applied to, but will also serve as a selection to hide or show in your Viewport if you so choose.

image-20241209-172717.png

You can choose to check / uncheck geometry either by UV Tiles (UDIMs) or by Mesh names.

Once your selection is made, you will see the number of meshes affected by your layer in your previously-empty dotted square :

image-20241209-172944.png

This mask can be modified by clicking on that box again and checking/unchecking options, or by right-clicking the box directly. You can also directly select UDIMs when you have the UDIM view opened :

image-20241209-173109.png

To use those selections to HIDE or SHOW selected meshes :

  • click back on the main component of your layer, at the very left of it

  • then up on the right side, in the Viewport options, click the crossed-out eye

image-20241209-173355.png

This will hide the meshes you decided to exclude from your Geometry mask.

This means there is no need for that extra step of scattering the meshes to be able to paint the underside of clothing, hair, eyes etc. We can do it straightaway in Painter from our regular .fbx Publish from the SYNK pipe.