Layer stack Performance profiling

[Leslie315441796xa1]

Are there any ways to profile the computational intensity of layers inside of a substance painter file and if not i guess id have this as a feature request.

Ive run into the issue that when setting up workflows that go beyond the fill layer and a tiling noise that its hard to know how well its really performing and where sometimes the laggyness while painting comes from

Substance designer has a way to see the calculation time of individual nodes so it would be great to have an equivalent inside of that inside of painter with callouts . exposure to the python api would be a plus.

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hi @Leslie315441796xa1,

Thank you for the request.

I admit that would be very handy to have something similar to the "Display Timing" option in Substance Designer. Currently, we don't have anything of the sort, be I'm sharing your idea to the rest of the team.

That being said, there are a few things to know regarding performances when working with Substance Painter:

• Use groups. Groups are acting like cache points, in addition to tidy your layer stack. It's basically like Painter is computing only the result of the group instead of each layers individually.
  
  
• Geometry masks are litteraly the best option to optimize a Painter project. It behaves differently than usual masks. Where a classical mask still computes everything even if not visible, the Geometry computes only what's displayed.
  
  
• Careful with Passthrough blending mode. This is usually the blending mode for Filters or Clone tool, but it recomputes every layers beneath it, so it can be quite heavy on performances. If not needed for the entire layer stack, it's worth putting the passthrough layer in a group.
  
  
• Painter saves every strokes made with your brush. Therefore, if you have a very low Spacing value, Painter will compute way more strokes than if you're using the default value. Make sure to use a value corresponding to your needs and not always the lowest possible.

There are obvisouly other things you can do to optimize a project (simple things like reducing texture set resolution), but I'd say those are the main things that you can easily work with without impacting your workflow too much.

[Leslie315441796xa1]

thank you for the reply and the suggestions! most of them i was aware of except for the geometry mask one!