Questions about UV + Substance painter

[Anonymous]

I've got a mesh that I created in Maya, and I attempted to create UVs for it. When I exported it and loaded it into Unity and live linked it to Substance Painter, I noticed that the textures I would apply in SP were quite low res. The textures themselves are high res, but on both SP and Unity, the textures just looked blurry and terrible. I've attempted to find the answers for the past few days but I haven't gotten responses or didn't know what to actually search for. What could the problem be? I presume that it has something to do with the resolution of the UVs, yet can't figure out how to increase the resolution of the UVs so that when I export my .FBX file, the UVs are at a higher resolution, rather than just exporting a snapshot of the UVs at a higher resolution and editing it like that.

I desperately need help, thanks!

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous and welcome to the community!

Can you post some screenshots of the UVs and how it looks in Unity/Substance Painter?

Even a 1024x1024 texture can look good but it will depend on the UVs and how well you've laid them out to take up as much space as possible so it is most likely a UV issue.

[Anonymous]

I just watched a video on "texel density", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e6zvJqVqlA

and I do believe it's explaining my problem quite well. In terms of UVs I have quite a complex model, (even though it's basic and ****ty because I'm not a 3d modeler or an artist or anything, I'm just taking a game development course) which is a floating island. I actually have no idea how I would be able to pack my UVs well enough considering the entire model and all of the UVs are asymmetrical (and there's a lot of small UVs have been created based on the fact that my model is bumpy, and I don't know how I would go about fixing that or what the solution for that is, whether it be sacrificing the bumpiness for a more simple model) 

My question is, how does anyone actually make models like this with high res textures? Especially if they're not symmetrical and have various different textures on them like grass, sand, dirt, stone, and whatnot? Is it even possible? 

Here's pictures of my UVs after I did an automatic unwrapping. I haven't done anything with them because I would prefer to get some good advice on whether or not I should even bother attempting anything, or even use a model like this. What kinds of workarounds are there for this kind of thing? Thanks!

[mspeer]

Hi!

Not sure about the scale, but if this model is an island where you want to walk with a character on, then you need to take a complete different approach.

You need to use a repeatable texture and repeat it multiple times over the object.

Of course you need to use a different mapping then.

With a single texture you would need a resolution of 40k x 40k or more (not a good idea).

However if this is only a background object than one single texture should work fine.

For further help please add more details,

- your texture size,

- screenshots of how it looks in Unity and Substance Painter

- maybe the Maya scene + the texture.

[damaggio]

Hi Catherine , Maya and Unity are two very different softwares, if you are planing to use it in an Engine you better off using their texturing tools and shaders. You can also look at how many Udims Unity support and their maximum texture file size, I believe Unreal supports 4 Udims , unlike Maya that can use hundreds ( typical in film work).

asside from that you can try more tillable textures and similar layered shaders in Unity, but you'll need to read about that in their documentation. 

Large terrains usually involve the work of a whole team to look good at player level.

As a final thought you can shelf this one for a while and think about something smaller in size as you are still learning.

Best.

[Anonymous]

It's kinda odd, when I use my texture (which I think was like 3k or something?) and tile it really small, it appears more blurry than when it's bigger. I'm sure that's something to do with the UVs, but I don't really know how I would even go about fixing that. I'll show a crappy gif to help explain lol. Regardless, I found half a solution. If I section my mesh out into different parts where I want different textures to be, I can apply lamberts to each section and then drag my texture onto it in Unity, and mess around with the tiling to get a desirable look. The only problem there is that there's no blend between the two sections so it obviously doesn't look too good. I think I might just buy some cheap Unity assets that allow me to vertex paint on my meshes. 

Is there no way to use substance painter to tile textures or even paint at their highest quality regardless of UVs? If I compare the tiling of my texture from Unity and SP, Unity's ignores the mesh's UVs and just keeps the texture at a high quality. Why is this not possible in SP? I'm an absolute newbie so I have very little understanding of how it works. Also yes it's an island that is walked on. If it was just in the distance, the textures would look good enough.

Thanks.

[mspeer]

Hi!

The repetition has to be done by the 3D engine otherwise you get a "baked" result.

As far as i know Substance Painter does not have such a feature, so you can't do this in Substance Painter.

Work in Substance on a single tile on a dummy object for texture creation and create the repetitions and further material settings in the final application, which is Unity for you.

[sean.heasley · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous 

@mspeer  and @damaggio  have provided some solid information.

To further elaborate, for an island like what you have using a tiling textures would definitely be the best result as you can make the texture tile more as well in UE4 or Unity to get some more resolution.

You can also do something like what I did which is break up the model into seperate shells and then stack them so while the texture is repeating you get a lot more resolution out of it and can hide the tiling with a seamless texture and/or vertex painting.

In this example the shells are all the same size and stacked on each other so they take up the maximum amount of space while also tiling.

[sean.heasley]

Hi @Anonymous 

I'm just checking in to see if you need more help with this. Did the suggestions that @damaggio @mspeer  and I provided work for you?

If so, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.