Substance Painter running incredibly slow, already tried a bunch of settings.

[AquilasDev]

Basically the title, I was painting along, happy as can be until suddenly the lag attacked. It takes anywhere form 3-20 minutes to compute a single stroke of the paintbrush.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled on my fast SSD.

I've updated my windows preferences to both Best Performance on Power Settings and Best Performance on Substance Painter specifically.

I have "Saved and Reduced File Size"

I have upped my cache limit to the max and also moved all caches, preview, and temp files to my SSD.

I have tried only working on one layer at a time.

I have reduced the resolution of my UVs to 1k for the main body texture and 512 and 256 for the eyes. I have Sparse Vrtual Texture enabled/Hardware support acceleration.

I don't feel like my model is particularly super detailed or layered compared to other Subtance projects I see. 

Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Six-Core ~3.4Ghz

Memory: 64GM DDR4

DirectX 12

When running performance tests while it was trying to compute a brush stroke it was using 66% of my GPU and somewhere around 35% of my main CPU.

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hi @AquilasDev,

and thanks for the message.

Substance 3D Painter running slow could be due to multiple issues. Would you mind to share with me your log (help>export log...), so I can have a better idea on what's going on?

Could you also send a full screenshot of your substance project with the wireframe? Depending on the project, the issue could also come from a very low poly wireframe.

Keep me updated.

[AquilasDev]

Yes, certainly. I uploaded the log to my Google Drive here : Substance Log 
And heres the Screenshot: Wilddog Wireframe 
And I would like to amend a detail, my GPU when I next checked was running at something like 83% trying to compute the stroke.

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hmmm the GPU and CPU are a bit old, but still in our minimum requirement. If your project was running 10 4K tiles, I'd have suspected the hardware, but from what you're describing, this is maybe not the issue.

Does the problem only appear with this specific project or if you open a Sample it's still lagging?

If it does only happen with this specific project, would you mind also sharing the project, so I can run some tests on my PC?

On another note, I'd strongly advise you to make sure your GPU driver is updated. Quiet often, the solve is as easy as this.

Best regards,

[AquilasDev]

I actually did update my drivers and did not notice an improvement. Working in the Sample projects goes fine. I heard someone online say that a lot of brush strokes in a project was bad? Although that seems really problematic for a painter program! 

Here is the link to the project - as you can see I got a fair amount done before it ground to a stop.

Substance Project 

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hello @AquilasDev,

I've taken a look at the project and it is unfortunately broken. The issue comes from the custom smart mat used in the layer stack. Tell me if I'm wrong, but the asset seems to be this one and it is clearly unoptimized.

The dynamic stroke can be a very expensive feature and on top of that, it has been set with unoptimised options like Random per stamp. Crossed with the Anchor point that forces almost all the layer stack to reload, this was the perfect mix for lagging. 

I noticed the soft doesn't lag as long as you're not touching the custom smart mat, therefore I'd advise you to export the textures when it's working, reimport them in a new project and start from there without the custom asset.

I know how bothering this can be, but I don't see many alternatives.

Best regards

[AquilasDev]

Well actually this isn't terrible news. The most valuable thing about the custom brush is the height data. So are you saying I can export that layer and come back and do the color?

Also, noob question, but when I export the textures can I combine that height data with my normal map thats already baked from my high poly?

[AquilasDev]

*I can't seem to find the edit button but I answered the export question myself lol

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Legit question. Usually, the height channel is added to the exported normal map. Check in your exported map, the height channel should be in the normal map.

[davescm]

For clarity - if your export setting uses a Converted normal map (most templates do)  then it will include the height information. The straightforward normal map does not.

Dave