Steve5D7C
Explorer
Steve5D7C
Explorer
Activity
‎Oct 15, 2024
12:00 PM
OK, immediately after posting I see that the export template is being run "from cache". This explains why my versions are not updating. This is idiotic. Why does a cache even exist for output templates? A totally unnecessary complication. There is no situation I can think of where you would want or need this. My other comments overall stand.
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‎Oct 15, 2024
11:56 AM
Is there a reason the texture export options have to be so completely, desperately unintuitive? I know this menu set existed before Adobe bought the product, but I have never, ever been able to wrap my head around what should really be one of the simplest parts of this program. It only needs to basically handle a few things: 1) What texture sets do I want to export 2) What channels do I want to export 3) File format and resolution 4) Naming conventions Yet it's completely overloaded with options, none of which function in a remotely intuitive way to the point that even setting up a naming convention is a massive headache. I've tried reusing existing templates, often having to add a version number into the string by hand (since, so far as I can tell there isn't a version token available, WTF?), only to find that even this doesn't work and my version number will get stuck on a particular version even when I update it by hand in the saved/copied template that I've created. There are parts of the output names of textures that I simply do not have a clue how they are generated, e.g. a string that says "$mesh_BaseColor_Knotted_($colorSpace)_v007" will generate a texture named "Quadratus_Lumborum_BaseColor_Knotted_Utility - sRGB - Texture_v005". Where does the word "Texture" come from in this naming string? And why doesn't the version number update properly? And why is the "Save Settings" button in the "Output Templates" tab ALWAYS grayed out and unavailable? It would be normal to expect this button to become active upon making ANY change to the currently open template, in order to save out a version. I would not expect it to be this difficult.
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‎Mar 31, 2023
09:07 AM
I tend to get condescending with people who waste my time with platitudinous responses or dumb questions about what I have and haven't tried, or whose idea of help is stating the blatantly obvious. This just creates noise whilst giving the illusion that they are somehow "helping". Thank you for the only useful response in this thread. I hope to see this implemented as quickly as possible.
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‎Mar 30, 2023
11:40 AM
This is a completely pointless, redundant post. It's already been confirmed above that this is a functionality. Also, maybe assume that other people aren't idiots?
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‎Mar 30, 2023
09:50 AM
I would think it would be obvious that artists would want this, and whether or not there is a "logical" explanation is beside the point. There should be a way to solo ANY LAYER in order to see what its contribution is to the final material, period. I simply don't accept that this isn't possible from a technical perspective either -- I'm used to working with 3D renderers and the ability to pass almost limitless data types into buffers with primary and secondary rays turned on or off at will. You're telling me there's no way to simply get your software to hide the pixels on one layer whilst keeping the pixels in the layer above it visible? Maybe you need better software engineers?
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‎Mar 29, 2023
10:56 AM
Maybe I'm missing something, but there seems to be no way to view a cloned paint layer on its own. If I have just two layers, one a source layer and another a paint layer that is cloning the source, if I turn off the source layer's visibility the cloned layer disappears as well. Obviously this is not ideal -- at all -- for workflow. It should be possible to view ONLY what's on the cloned layer to look for issues. Is there some way to do this? If not, this is another strange, unintuitive Substance behavior.
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‎Mar 16, 2023
08:44 PM
Adobe, please prioritize improving the UI for folders. In a complex project with a lot of folders, subfolders and sub-sub folders they are almost unuseable in their current state. No indentation, UI jumps around when you open or close one so while searching you quickly lose track of which one you opened, no easy way to see which layers are children of others etc. etc. The only organizational tool right now is colors, which helps but is still completely insufficient. Not everyone even names folders and layers properly, so picking up another artist's work in particular can be a nightmare made almost impossible by the lack of a decent UI design for this CORE part of the Substance workflow. Even Photoshop has better UI design that this.
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‎Mar 16, 2023
08:39 PM
Please put "Save As" back in the root file menu. Seriously, why would anyone think it a good idea to hide the CONSTANTLY used "Save As" in a secondary rollout. Do you understand how often a busy artist needs to use this? Following the paradigm of just about every single other piece of software in existence, this needs to be in the root of the file menu, NOT under some "options" submenu.
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‎Feb 17, 2023
11:18 AM
I later discovered that with UV projected textures at least, once the correct aspect ratio has been set it IS possible to resize the texture and maintain that in the UV view by manually resizing the bounding box/manipulators. However, I'm not aware of any comparable capability in 3D projected textures which tend to be used far more (this IS a 3D paint program after all). So the best solution would still be to implement a "maintain aspect ratio" checkbox or something similar that DOESN'T make X=Y when it's enabled and respects whatever the current aspect ratio is. It's not a big deal to have to calculate the correct aspect ratio manually once, but if it's then necessary to do it multiple times while sizing the texture it's a royal PIA. Please expedite inclusion of this basic functionality. Another solution would to stop Substance from making every texture square to begin with.
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‎Feb 15, 2023
02:40 PM
1 Upvote
Unless I'm missing something, there's a fundamental functionality missing in the way that texture placement works. If I bring in a nonsquare texture, obviously I want to retain its correct aspect ratio. Substance automatically makes everything square. That would be fine if there were an easy way to set non-uniform scaling (e.g. X=1, Y=1.5), then LOCK that relationship, then be able to continue scaling the texture. This is not possible -- unlocking then relocking X and Y values will simply make them uniform again (in this case, 1.5 would be reset to 1). This is ridiculous. This wouldn't be such an issue except for the fact that textures ALSO interpret alpha/transparency into channels where I don't want it, e.g. roughness and metallness. There is ALSO no easy way to disable this. So the textures that I necessarily make square to avoid problem number 1, then go on to create problem number 2. Either give us a way to keep the correct aspect ratio on nonsquare textures, or an easy way to prevent transparency in square textures from unwanted channel contributions. It should NOT be necessary to create masks or separate alpha textures just to deal with this.
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‎Sep 28, 2022
03:46 AM
Seriously, it seems like both the CG software companies I rely on (Adobe and Autodesk) literally go out of their way to screw their users with every new release. What absolute idiot thought it was a good idea to remove a whole bunch of formats and codecs from AE in this way? Not only does this complicate and slow down the output process, but Media Encoder absolutely sucks, and furthermore your render settings, file name, file format, codec, and output path now NO LONGER GET SAVED WITH YOUR AE PROJECT. This was my workflow for almost two decades -- save the project file with render module (or sometimes multiple output modules) so that you could always retrace your output steps, often a necessity in the professional world. But, apparently Adobe knows and cares nothing about the actual world of professional artists and animators. I really wonder who they think their user base is?
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‎Sep 08, 2022
05:10 PM
Seems like the paint tool requires that the center of the brush is over the surface in order to have any effect. This means that using large, soft brushes for example to skim along the edge of a UV chunk using only the outer edge of the brush footprint for masking purposes is impossible. Would be nice if this worked a little better.
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‎Sep 02, 2022
09:26 AM
Why does Painter insist on going back to base color from mask mode when I switch layers? Working in mask mode is often the quickest way to see which surfaces in a complex scene have which materials, but every time I switch layers it jumps back to base color. This is really disruptive to workflow. With a complex scene with many layers, keeping track of material assignment is already extremely difficult in Painter and it's important to try to avoid overlapping materials. So masking is very important. Working in mask mode to quickly check thru all layers in this way would really be the fastest method... except Painter jumps out of this mode with every layer change, and all the associated redraw time that this entails. Think I really might have to learn Mari.....
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‎Sep 01, 2022
11:23 AM
Yes, that's pretty obvious. There were layers with roughness channels below the one I was setting to subtract. It didn't work.
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‎Aug 31, 2022
12:58 PM
It's ridiculous that autosave still kicks in right in the middle of a texture export. Please disable this. Some texture exports can take several minutes and are obviously CPU intensive. The last thing that's needed is the program doing an autosave right in the middle of this, with all the associated potential for a complete crash, or even worse a file corruption.
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‎Aug 31, 2022
11:24 AM
Never mind, although it still doesn't make sense to me that setting the roughness channel to "subtract" doesn't work, I realized I needed to set the affected channel in the levels effect to roughness, then invert. This got me the result I wanted.
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‎Aug 31, 2022
11:19 AM
Am I missing something, or do neither blend modes or levels work on a layer that has only roughness applied via a texture? I have some white lettering that's being 3D projected, via a PNG with transparency. If I duplicate this layer and plug it into a roughness only fill layer, I get the expected white values in the roughness channel. However, if I want this value to be black, I should be able to color correct only this layer somehow, such as by applying a levels effect with "invert" checked (to get a black roughness value). Or, setting the blend mode on the roughness channel on the layer to "subtract" should have a similar effect. Neither seems to work and my roughness values on the lettering stay white. It's as if the roughness channel is continuing to read values directly from the texture and ignoring any downstream processes. ???
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‎Aug 30, 2022
10:12 AM
I'd love to see feature that allows for the editing of more than one mask at the same time. In particular, when doing lookdev work it's common to test out materials on various surfaces. Often I find I am adding and removing objects and faces from a mask while doing this. Since it's generally a best practice to NOT have one material covering another on the same surface, I usually want to make sure that any area of a material that is not going to be visible in final maps masked out. It would therefore be super helpful to have the ability to automatically subtract from one mask by adding to another, or vice versa. This would be especially helpful when using the face and mesh fill tools.
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‎Aug 25, 2022
03:21 PM
There are always workarounds for any software's shortcomings, and needless to say I've tried these. They barely help at all, and in themselves just result in extra work and waiting for their own redraws, as well as constantly having to check which layers are turned on and off. It's clear that this program needs a proper redraw on-off switch. I'm not sure what you mean about ensuring Sparse Virtual Texture support -- the only setting I can see in there is a hardware support acceleration toggle. Is that what you're referring to?
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‎Aug 25, 2022
01:44 PM
2 Upvotes
Surely there MUST be a way in Painter to pause screen redraw? If there isn't, this is a much needed feature that should be implemented ASAP. When dealing with heavy models with multiple UDIMs at 4k or higher, I'm having to wait for a slow redraw with every tiny change I make. Often I know I want to make several changes before I need to see the result, and the absence of any ability to prevent Painter from redrawing after every change just results in constant waiting and wasted time. I have 256Gb of system RAM and a GTX 3080 with 10Gb VRAM, so this isn't a system problem.
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‎Aug 18, 2022
01:57 PM
That's only a half measure, since I want to see what the material is at a glance as well, which I would not be able to do using this method.
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‎Aug 18, 2022
01:53 PM
Please give us a way to disable the wireframe that is automatically overlaid on the model when using mesh fill. This frequently completely obscures which surfaces have been selected.
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‎Aug 18, 2022
12:30 PM
First of all, the way this forum is designed SUCKS. If you type a bunch of stuff in this field and then change the "Conversation Type" radio button above, it erases everything. Brilliant web programming Adobe. Now, is there a way to change the color or properties of the default material? If not this is ludicrous. This material shows as a glossy white material, which is a real pain the ass if your model also requires a similar material to actually be created on parts of it -- a situation I am currently dealing with, with a very complex model with a lot of small parts. I need to be able to see at a glance what has been painted and what hasn't. Yes, I KNOW I can go into "Base Color" mode, or create a colored fill layer at the bottom of my stack. But these are both inconvenient workarounds, and the latter simply adds bloat to an already large project file. There should be a way to either turn off the default material completely in fully shaded mode, or change its color to something obvious like bright red.
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‎Aug 17, 2022
07:59 PM
Give that the texture export process is probably THE MOST IMPORTANT THING that Painter does and is the ultimate point of the software's entire existence, would it be too much to ask that we get some sort of confirmation that textures have been successfully output and the process is completed? It's ridiculous that there isn't one. Likewise, a more obvious update on saving a project than the TINY "project saving" barely visible in the bottom right of the UI would be nice. Projects can quickly get into massive file sizes so saving takes a long time. These types of things make busy artists' lives a lot more pleasant. Thank you.
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‎Aug 17, 2022
12:53 PM
It seems really weird that paint and fill layers currently share exactly the same display icon in the layers palette. These are fundamentally different types of layers, so they need to have clearly identifiable different icons so that artists can see at a glance what type of layer it is. Currently, SFAIK, the ONLY way to tell the difference is to click on the layer and look to see whether or not the the paint tools are disabled. Really?
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‎Aug 17, 2022
12:50 PM
5 Upvotes
Currently the only way to identify layers that share a group is to choose one of the limited number of colors available for a layer, with members of the "folder" being assigned a slightly darker shade of the same color. This is better than nothing, but PLEASE implement an indented display similar to Photoshop so that's is very, very easy AT A GLANCE to see which layers are groups and which layers are the group members. With complicated projects with lots of layers, this is currently not the case.
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‎Aug 17, 2022
12:17 PM
Is there a way to make a selection or mask using the transparency in a PNG texture that's plugged into a fill layer? I'm thinking something along the lines of the way you can do this in Photoshop by Ctrl clicking onto a layer that has transparency to select only the pixels that have values. I have numerous PNGs with transparency plugged into the color channels of fill layers being 3D projected onto my model. I want to be able to select or mask these areas so that I can create custom isolated roughness etc for them. Is there a way to do this?
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‎Oct 06, 2021
12:34 PM
OK, well thanks at least for confirming this is "normal" behavior (Read: Another way that Ae sucks and evidence that Adobe has never, ever bothered to cater to the 3D animation community despite it making up a sizeable chunk of its user base). Rendering a completely vanilla beauty pass is rarely efficient, as it usually means rendering and paying for the full render twice -- once with and once without passes I really should just use Nuke. On another note: Even this forum is rubbish -- must be the single only forum on the web that when it emails you a reply notification doesn't provide a link back to the thread.
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‎Oct 06, 2021
11:37 AM
These are 16-bit multichannel EXR files and absolutely have a lot of other custom channels in them. However, these channels are remaining consistent across versions. And the alpha is always the alpha so it's hard to imagine why/how Ae needs to reset its interpretation every time.
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