Substance Painter color fill selection / uv issue ???

[SnowCold]

Hello, so I just picked up Substance 3D Painter a couple of days ago, finally abandoning the beyond ancient 3D Coat (which just gave me one headache after another).

But I am having weird issues with coloring my first model. Like the polygons are weirdly connected in some places, maybe it's the uv doing weird stuff but I honestly have no clue. Video: https://imgur.com/a/RS9SzMQ

When coloring one part of the model, it colors another one as well, seemingly at random. The eraser tool wont do anything as well. I tried directly painting on it, doing it with a fill and black mask, but the issue persists and randomly appears each time. I tried Smart UV unwrapping in Blender, Auto UV Unwrap in Substance Painter, changing the Template to Blender when setting up the Project in Substance Painter, checking my geometry, normals and verts in blender, but nothing helped. The issue seems to pop up at random and I don't know enough to try and find a solution beyond what I did.

Putting the same exact mesh into 3D Coat Textura has none of these problems, but I mean the software is awful to use, thats why I got Substance Painter in the first place 😞

So yea at this point I have no clue what the problem is, geometry is fine, uv in substance looks a bit off (but I don't know too much about uv's to actually be able to tell). Maybe I am importing the .fbx wrong idk .... any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hello @SnowCold,

Thank you for your message and for the video (always helps understanding the problem).

The issue is indeed due to UVs. Some of your UV islands are very small, probably not much bigger than a single pixel and this might create artifacts like the ones you're facing.

In fact, if you're increasing the Texture Set resolution, you will probably face less artifacts, but the best would be to keep clean UVs and avoid the famous "Smart UV project" that usually adds more problems than it solves.

Let me know if it helps.

[SnowCold]

Thank you for your help, since I personally don't understand much about UV's except that they are flat texture maps I am relying on Automatic UV operations, so I was hoping that there would be some other way by changing the settings for the Auto UV in Substance Painter or Blender.

Sadly I cant change the Texture Set resoltuion, as the max resolution for the game engine the asset is supposed to be in is 1024 (and anything higher would ulitmately just get decompressed).

If you have any other suggestions on what I could do I would be more than appreciative!

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hi @SnowCold,

You can try to use Substance Painter's Automatic Unwrapping. It usually doesn't make small islands as Blender does with its Smart UV project. However, our Automatic Unwrapping can have hard time computing hard surfaces objects, so I don't guarantee that it will be perfect.

When creating a new project, check the "Auto-unwrap" box and specify "Recompute all" in the options panel.

That being said, if you want clean texturing, you'll need to learn how to build clean UVs.

Best regards,