Substance painter deletes all the work when geo is updated

[Matt Justice]

Can there be a button that forces substance to not delete all your layers when you update your geometry with geo that has different uvs ? Im not sure why anyone would want it do delete all your work when you update your geometry. It seems like one of the worst things about this program. It dosnt make any sense why this is a thing.

[Matt Justice]

All your user created channels also get deleted. A long with mesh maps.

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hello @Matt Justice,

I indeed advise you to save before reimporting the mesh, in case the process fails. To be clear, you won't lose the layer stack as long as the reimporting process works as it should. The ability to reimport meshes in Painter can be extremely useful – but it also has some specific limitations that you should keep in mind.

Substance Painter uses three elements to reproject the textures correctly:

1. The brush strokes (all the strokes made in the viewport are saved in the project file).
2. The camera position of every stroke.
3. The bounding box (which is basically an invisible cube which encases the entire model)

When you reimport a 3D model, Painter takes the first stroke made in the project, and based on its camera position reapplies the strokes on the bounding box. It then repeats this process for the second stroke, the third, and so on.

The great thing with this workflow is that UVs are rarely an issue for reprojection, even with UVs that are strictly different – though this isn’t the case for masks made with UV islands, or strokes painted in the 2D view.

However, if the geometry has greatly changed, the process can fail, especially when 3D model Units are different.

Regards,