Keep pose upon importing into substance painter for baking without texture sets

[Valerie-Bosco]

I'm working on a semi-complex warhammer model, meaning the ability for the mechanical parts to be baked separately to animate it later is essential
I cannot provide screenshots of the model only the settings and structure, being it's under NDA

when I import said model into substance painter due to optimization constraints I cannot use separate texture sets so, my usual workflow was to export it into an explode-ed pose bake it and then simply export into the game engine with the default non-explode-ed pose

I recently started to work on this type of models in substance painter and I can't replicate my workflow

when I import the model, none of the methods to bake the pose worked
applying the pose as rest pose destroys the pose, the high poly needs modifiers to not be applied for further changes and alternate versions, so no it's not an option

does substance painter not have support for posed models, or am I missing something?

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hello @Valerie-Bosco,

Have you already try to bake matching by name? It's basically the same thing as an exploded baking, but no need to actually have an exploded mesh.

Keep me posted.

[Valerie-Bosco · Accepted solution]

Thank you for replying
I forgot to mention that I did try so, I'm unsure if it's due to the version of SP or due to some other issue

when I did try, I originally had a mesh with separate pieces ready to use bake by matching name

but I ran into bleed over in both normal maps and AO, curvature and world normals were fine
I'm using SP 2023 steam edition
I've run into other problems like UVs not updating in new projects when using the same fbx name, not relevant, but it does lead me to believe the bleed over could possibly be a bug

but the end result would lead to broken dilation as for some reason the settings do not respect the pixel values set before exporting, either it's no dilation or infinite, being it's a game asset I cannot have 6+ different parts leading to a draw call each for one single object, but merging them together breaks the textures due to dilation bleeding over, no ID map masking supported by the engine either sadly

I know most of these are project and game engine constraints, but the inability to import a posed model into SP is something I did not expect nor that it would lead to this many complications

I will mark it as the correct answer if there's no support for posed meshes, I ended up creating tests and baking the parts displaced with no pose seems to work, it's baked in tangent space so moving them back won't cause trouble, but it does make the workflow in substance painter much, much slower that what I used before