Alembic Texture Sets

[WB Michael]

The Substance Painter docs state that

Substance 3D Painter will automatically create a new Texture Set each time it finds a material ID on an imported mesh

but it does not find any materials when imporing Alembic caches. Right now, I'll only get a single "DefaultMaterial" texture set.

How should I prepare Alembic geometry when exporting from Houdini, Maya, Blender, ... to make it work?

Thanks! Michael

[WB Michael]

Never mind, I found a way: I had assigned the materials to "Packed Alembics" in Houdini and that didn't make it through the Alembic exporter ROP. After adding "Unpack" and "Convert" SOPs, the ROP did include the material assignments and the cache is correctly interpreted by Substance Painter. Yay! 😄

[WB Michael]

I also get correct texture sets from Blender Alembic caches with "Face Sets" enabled during export.

No luck with Maya though: With "Write Face Sets" enabled, Substance Painter will detect face sets from materials assigned to faces but not materials assigned to objects.

Should we assign all materials on a per-face level before export? Is there a recommended way to do that (maybe via a script)?