#you don't know how many times i get questions about ppl being completely lost wiht that tutorial

[thefoxburyinstitute]

a substance painter tip for those who texture objects...(and clothing)

instead of exporting multiple PBR textures and rebaking them again in blender, may i offer an alternate solution?

instead of exporting with the PBR metallic roughness template, try exporting it out using the 2d view template.

long technical explanation under the cut

girl, why am i doing this? i like spending hours and hd space on these maps?

1 - sims 4 does not use PBR materials so exporting PBR maps (roughness, specular, diffuse, ao, normal) and rebaking them all in blender is a waste of time.

2 - you've already baked mesh maps in substance. you already have a normal, thickness, curvature, ambient occlusion, and id map. 2d view just bakes all that shit into one diffuse map that you can bring into photoshop (or s4s) and you can recolour off of that vs baking each colour in blender. we are saving TIME and saving your GPU.

3 - baking textures through substance is a lot easier on your computer than blender cycles.

4 - blenders PNG output has a diff colour profile than photoshop. so if you bring it into photoshop, your bakes look dull and terrible. it looks dull in game too. maybe that's the look you're going for, but i find recolouring a clean grey base is a lot easier than recolouring something that already has colour information. substance painter maintains the colour profile from photoshop so you're already working in that adobe environment. and your base for your recolour looks consistent within both programs.

5 - if you don't want to use just a 2d view map, you can create your own template in substance painter. my template consists of 1) diffuse texture 2) an ao map (for shadow), 3) an id map if i used multiple materials (sims 3 ppl know what this is) and 4) my normal or if i want more detail, i do normal maps through this site or photoshop, or njob. i layer those maps in photoshop for added detail. from there i add my swatches and export each out as png. in the "my project" tab in substance, you can click each of the mesh maps and export it out manually as well.

i can explain this if it doesn't make sense but don't spend hours fooling around with nodes in blender when you already have a powerful texturing program at your disposal. learn to use it in a way that speeds up your workflow!