Substance Painter fundamentally broken for a production pipeline

I understand that one of the design principles of Substance Painter is to be procedural, non-destructive workflow and to allow the user to adjust resolution and to be able to modify the mesh UVs at any time.  The requirement for this feature is that the mesh can not change.  This is a MAJOR issue when working in a production environment.

Never once have I received feedback from an art director asking for a UV change.  What I have been asked to do is make a proportion change or to add some geometry to a character.  When I bring it back into substance and update my mesh…well there goes all my hand painted masks.  Sometimes the masks vanish from assets that are in the exactly the same place and have not been updated.  The work around for this?  Export your masks and import them back in as a mask fill layer.  So much for my non-destructive workflow.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When working on heads, you typically use the same base mesh with the same UVS.  It would be amazing to have the ability to switch out the head mesh to another character, or to update the mesh with a mouth open or eyes closed blendshape applied without having to retexture it each time.

I would much rather lose the ability to change my resolution on the fly or update my UVs than to have the ability to project my strokes onto the UVs instead of worldspace when I update the mesh.  My resolution has already been set for the character so I am working at that from the start and have no desire to change that.  I have yet had the need to upscale any textures when working in production.

I understand that some have the argument that the mesh should be approved and locked off at the low poly stage but this is very rarely a possibility in a studio environment.  We need to be able to iterate right up to the end and currently Substance Painter makes this very hard.

Please give us a “bake to UVS” option when updating our geometry, even if it comes with a warning that it will rasterize our strokes.  I don’t mind if that means we cant update our brush shape on those strokes anymore.  I would rather keep the strokes I spent the time painting.

If this cant be done, please give us the ability to collapse our masks within painter without having to go through all the work of having to export it out, re import it back in and then assign it to a fill layer.  Even if it needs to be exported as a file, painter should be able to automatically export it to our project or add it to our projects shelf and replace the collapsed masks with this new texture.  Again, I know we will lose out “non destructive” workflow but let us at least make the decision on how we want to work. 

It can be frustrating to see all these new tools being developed like substance 3d modeler or substance stager when the “industry standard” core product is still so lacking in some fundamental ways.