How do you 'update' an already existing texture with new work on a mesh?

[Feld Four]

Maybe you can see what I’m trying to do here.

I have a texture atlas I’m setting up of little textures for things like posters and such; what I’m trying to do is that as I create more posters in Blender and import those meshes in Substance Painter to work on them, I want the textures I eventually create on them to slot into a texture atlas I’m continually updating.

Essentially;

-Make poster in Blender, UV unwrap, etc

-Import the mesh AND the master texture in Substance Painter, do my thing, the mesh is already UV unwrapped within the bounds of where I want its textures to sit on the atlas

-Export the texture with atlas updated

What happens instead is that when I export a texture in Substance it just makes a whole new file. What I want instead is the image above to continually update as I add. Is this possible? Is this possible to work around if Substance can’t do it?

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hello @Feld Four,

Thank you for sharing your workflow.

If I got you right, you have two issues here.

1. When you export your work it creates a new file instead of replacing the previous one.

2. As in your last screenshot, the update doesn't go on top of the Atlas, but replace it.

For the first point, that's perfeclty normal. The new project probably doesn't have the same naming, therefore it can't override the previous one. If you want it to override, make sure it shares the same name and save it at the same location.

For the second point, that's also the expected behavior. Painter doesn't really compute what's outside UV islands (excepted Dilation)

Personally, I advise you a different kind of workflow. I advise you to create a "Master" project file, where you'll build the entire atlas.

Let's say you have finsihed modeling/unwrapping Object 01, you export it as a .FBX and launch Painter to work on its texture. Once it's done, you export the texture and the first loop is over (that's pretty much what you're already doing). But for the Object 02, instead of exporting it alone, you'll merge it with Object 01, and export both of them in the same file, overriding Object 01.

And instead of creating a new Painter Project, you reload the mesh (CTRL + SHIFT + R). This way, you should have Object 01 and Object 02 in the same Master project and done properly, you should even keep the layer stack. In addition, your texture export will automatically override the previous one.

Best regards,