Substance Painter 2020 - Geometry mask equivalent?

[ShifuYaku]

Hello, I am going to assume that there might be no help for this, but I was trying to follow along with a tutorial for Substance Painter because I bought it in 2020, but never used it until now. It's asking me to break my model up with a geometry mask? But I don't have this option, since it appears that it wasn't added to SP until 2021. Is there anything inside Painter 2020 that is similar to this, or am I SOL? 😕

Should I just upgrade my Painter and eat the lost cost? I don't think Adobe does free upgrades for legacies. I appreciate any help on this.

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hello @ShifuYaku,

Thank you for the message.

In many situations, you can use the Polygon Fill tool to mask areas depending on the mesh's geometry. The Mesh Fill can be a decent replacement for the Geometry mask.

Regarding updates with a perpetual license, you don't have access to updates past the year of buying. In your case, you have access to all updates from 2020, but not further.

Best regards,

[ShifuYaku]

Thanks so much for the response! I'll have to check out the polygon fill tool, it sounds very useful.

When I was trying to follow along with this tutorial, it had a section at the beginning where I had to set up my file to import the FBX and had me not check certain things. Once I got to the part that talked about geometry masks, that's when I got stuck. I tried to see if there were any other tutorials on Adobe that discussed other ways to separate out parts without having to actually have individual paint maps for individual objects. There was one video that talked about preparing models for Substance. I did a huge dive into understanding ID maps after posting this, because I really wanted to find a way to make Painter 2020 work for me before considering getting a new application.

In this case, I've discovered so far that before importing to Painter, you can set vertex colors to your individual meshes in your preferred 3D application (my case, I use Blender). Saving out the ID maps on the FBX and importing into Painter, you can then create fill layers to choose your vertex color from your baked map and control individual parts just like the geometry mask. It definitely adds a lot more steps to the process of texturing, but I think it's a great workaround for a tool that didn't exist in my version yet. If the model sample from the tutorial had utilized UDIMs, I could have also used that, but they had everything on one UV space (and also I ended up having to go into the original FBX anyway because they had some vertices outside of the UV boundaries).

A tutorial I have to attribute learning this from is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYjYPTHXGmI

It was very simple and straightforward on how to implement the ID map. I have yet to test adding materials to the selected folders I made on my objects, but I anticipate it will work similarly to how the masks do in newer versions.

I wanted to make a full post on this in case anyone else is in my situation and they needed help with something like this. It seems the geometry mask is now a very important aspect of Painter, and I'd love to experience it some day, but the ID maps will have to do. 🙂