Trees in Stager

[dimeolas7]

   Needing to bring in some trees and vegetation into Stager. is there a best way to do this? The trees are broken down and untextured. The only thing I can see now is to join the pieces of the tree into one mesh, say in maya and inport to painter. Then in Painter to apply each texture to the corresponding part.

But

I will need to run the parts of each texture thru Sampler to get something to use in Painter

But

when I try to bring them in the albedo file always gets flagged and refused because of a name conflict. There are not two files of the same name. 

In any case im out of ideas here. If someone can just give a link or a quick headsup I'd appreciate it very much.

[Ares Hovhannesyan]

Did you try to find them at Substance 3D Assets (adobe.com) and Substance 3D Community Assets (adobe.com)

[dimeolas7]

   Thank you but unfortunately there are none. Only textures and leaves. I can buy trees and shrubs on sites such as Artstation but need to know best practice on bringing them in.

[Ares Hovhannesyan]

Import & export formats | Substance 3D Stager (adobe.com)

Preparing models for use in Stager | Substance 3D Stager (adobe.com)

Please review 2 above links. There information that can help you to find ways how to import into Stager. 

In my practice I have some problems too. The way that I try to solve problem is using Generate UVs and Export UV in Stager  but another point is to customize object before importing in Dn via other 3d apps. 

[dimeolas7]

Thank you again, I learned how to import my textures to create a material and only have one more problem. For the leaves or needles on a tree one must apply an opacity map. When I do this the color in the material vanishes. I have to use the opacity maps or I have jagged triangles of color. I am Googling trying to find out whats wrong.

[JMathews]

Hi @dimeolas7 !  I'm sorry Im' not sure I really understand the problem you had.  You have some base parts (models and textures) and you want to import to Stager.  Have you tried just directly importing instead of going through Maya/Painter/Sampler?  There shouldn't be any need to do it in other tools, you can do it in Stager directly.

• Import your model pieces
• Use the transform tools to combine / arrange them as needed
• Create a material for each texture set / load the appropriate textures
• Assign your materials per part 

Were you saying the issue with the naming conflict was in Sampler, Painter, or Stager?

[dimeolas7]

 Thanks for the reply. My issue is I havent ever had to put trees together before and am not sure the proper procedure for stager. I don't want to spend all day on one tree if I dont have to. The tree mesh comes in pieces, a couple for the trunk and different branches and different ones for leaves. The textures come in parts as well. I am fine using these to put together for textures for each part. I was trying to bring them in to Sampler to create a single texture from the parts...albedo, normal maps etc. then could take the textures in to painter and apply them that way. But am getting an error in Sampler that won't allow the albedo to be used. 

I dont know if Stager will allow me to bring in the albedo, normal etc and combine them to create a texture and apply to the mesh. I'm just learning the software and the only thing I've seen is to drag and drop the texture on the mesh.

Will test that later tonight.

Thanks again

[dimeolas7]

   Didn't see a way to edit. Thank you, I now see how to build materials in Stager, duh. Trunk and branches are fine. Adding Opacity for the leaves turns them grey so maybe I need to flip it or something. Will play with that.

[dimeolas7]

Everything looks good except the needles/leaves. When I add Opacity texture to make my material I lose the color. They are all png files and I use the color, normal, gloss and opacity. I also have a subsurfaceamount png but no clue where to use it. 

[dimeolas7 · Accepted solution]

   I figured out whats wrong in Sampler. I'm guessing there's a naming convention. All of the textures for the trees are named something like

pineneedles_pinetree_normals.png

but the color texture map has no third designation, it's just pineneedles_pinetree.png. But when I inserted the word 'color' at the end it works. So what I'm hoping is to if nothing else convert the textures to a material for each part and texture the tree in Substance, tweak and import to Stager...or just pop it on in Stager itself.