Using same wear on multiple materials/masks/uvs

[OzBoz]

To practice a bit with Substance Painter I'm redoing an interior of a aircraft from Microsoft Flight Simulator.

It's an old aircraft so I use smartmasks a lot which is great fun. The thing is, on for example the panel with all gauges I've added a bit of dirt/scratches/roughness but on the same panel there are a lot of texts so a pilot knows what the buttons are.

Those texts are a different texture and have their own UV-map but basically the dirt/scratches/roughness from the panel should continue over the texts to have a realistic feel.

I tried to look for solutions if something like this was possible but so far I didn't find a solution. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong direction since I think this is pretty common practice with a lot of textures where texts are their own material/uv.

Hope someone can kick this oldie in the right direction!

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hello @OzBoz,

Nice project you have here!

Just to be clear, a UV map doesn't need to have a single material and a single Texture Set. You can pretty simply add several materials to a UV map, and use masks in order to hide or show the desired ones.

That being said, if the text from the panel is on a different Texture Set than the rest of the model, and you want the Smart masks to be applied on multiple Texture Sets ; I advise you to instantiate the Smart Masks across texture sets (CTRL + SHIFT + D).

This will allow you to duplicate the layer/group to another Texture Set, and to keep a link between the original layer and its duplicate.

Best regards,

[OzBoz]

Thank you for your response Cyril!

Indeed a fun project with a big educational value for me 😉 Unfortunately your suggestion doesn't work. That was also my first thought but it makes sense why it doesn't work since the smart-mask is based on the geometry where it's applied like the baked curvature/ao maps.
The decals are just some polygons with an opacity channel so a smart mask has not much to go with. In the screens you see how the wear will be applied on different spots. 

For it to work you basically should be able to use the smart-mask as a planar projection on the decal texture. At least, that was how I was thinking it might could work for this particular model. So I tried to look a bit more into that direction using Google but didn't really find a solution. I also read a bit about projection paint but don't think I should be in that direction.

Of course I could always brush some things away manually but I'm always impressed by how smart Substance Painter works and thought this was not really a rare scenario looking at a lot of game models. 

I hope someone has some kind of idea but it's also pretty hard to google for something like this, might try if someone at artstation has a nifty script but it's hard if you're not sure where to look at.

You're totally right about multiple materials inside one texture, happens a lot with this model as well and it's great how easy you can mask out things by paint UV islands/meshes or just with the geometry mask on a layer.

Anyway, thanks for your help!