Loading/Saving texture and models from normal network shares

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your reply! A network drive does work but is basically the same as the normal route of having your normal shared drives. It also displays exactly the same address as location so imo there is definitely a bug present since it does see the shares and files, it just can't import them.

All the arguments on Illustrator and Photoshop page are a bit sad actually. I work with Adobe Photoshop since version 2.5 and at every company we had a file server since you don't want people to save all their files locally and find out after a harddrive crashes. It also doesn't have to do with accounts and accessing the files, my desktop is allowed to look at my little server PC and since it's local and it knows the account credentials every single piece of software can save and load from that PC. 

I totally understand they don't want to solve network issues for people/companies and they are pretty clear about that. But there ain't an issue in a normal environment, it's 2023 and with a normal 1gbit you load files with 100MB/s which is for most things perfectly fine.

It's funny they also mention speed while they want you to do all things in the cloud, sorry but that's basically a bad joke. If you talk about slow and if you've network issues you can't reach your own files no more, that's the cloud, not the little fileserver pc next to me.

I think there was actually one Substance Painter version earlier where it was fixed but currently it doesn't work the way it should work. I don't mind to have a Substance Painter project locally since those are big files but I've a file server full of assets like materials etc I don't all want at my local PC. There no other program I use which doesn't allow me to use files from the fileserver. And I think it's really easy to fix since it does see the files and therefor my network drives perfectly fine. It's something which causes an exclamation mark which doesn't make sense.

Same with exporting textures. I can select a network location to export the textures perfectly fine , it just gives all  errors on export. That hasn't to do with permissions or the configuration of the network since every other program can. From Notepad to Photoshop they all can read/write to my fileserver.

Since it does work after mapping it to a letter I guess there's just something wrong on how Substance Painter puts the // or \\ in the directory structure and therefor it generates an error on actual import or export. 

A lot of actual network problems are really things from the past like the corrupt files which were mainly cost by slow network performance and server performance late 90's where it wasn't hard to overload a server when multiple people were writing files at the same moment. Also the harddrives were really slow which complicated things more timing wise. It's 20+ years later and things have evolved a bit luckily 🙂

Thanks again for your answer, I'll stick with the mapped drive for now!