Texture painting woes+

hardwire666

I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with texture painting. Specifically in reference to Diffeo/Daz stuff. I'm already familiar with it outside of Blender, and as well inside of Blender. That last part is why I'm asking this here. The performance of texture painting inside Blender is fairly unpredictable. Esp. when you start going above 1K with textures. Which is just about every effing texture, and frankly I need that resolution as I'm working on micro details and such. Searching/googling just yields a bunch of "how-to Blender > Substance". Which is great, but what I'm really looking for is "Blender to Substance back to Blender". OR any texture painting program for that matter, at least one that handles 4K textures without issue, and without having to destroy my shaders. I have 4 characters that have some slightly, but not really, complex shader trickery going on that are yielding the results I want in renders using a single Principled BSDF and I'd rather not start from scratch so to speak. Also, I admit that as I am typing this the realization that I may have to start from scratch is sinking in. Specifically, since I have not converted any of the materials to UDIM with Diffeo. Mainly because of my experiments in the past, Blender makes it more difficult to deal with UDIM than it should be. Typically making mangled short work of geografts and so on. 

My goal is, I am trying to work on texture-based details like fading the spec/clearcoat around the lips, skin micro details, a proper alpha fade on the sclera, better fingernails, and the list goes on. My problem as it stands is that Blender just is not exactly up to snuff. Typically these things don't bother me, it's a part of doing 3D, as well as any kind of Development. You learn to work around the pains, but in this case, I'm just tired of things slowing me down and want results. I accept you sometimes have to just muck around till stuff works. I even accept that it happens a lot of the time. but as a whole, I'm tired of it being all of the time.

So, if anyone has any experience in this little arena of Daz/Diffeo/Blender and texture painting that I can build on, please chime in!



P.s. If I was wealthy everything would just be able to open and then save to a .blend file. lol.

P.p.s. My workstation is 16 cores, 32 GB, and a 3080 12GB, and all assets are on an SSD. So my system is not the issue. Just in case anyone was thinking it. Blender is the only place I have these slowdowns, but I want to use Blender as much as I can. Tired of the stranglehold Autodesk, and Adobe have, and trying to cut them out more and more everywhere I can.  Also sorry for the long-winded post. lol.
 

hardwire666

So as I said, "Also, I admit that as I am typing this the realization that I may have to start from scratch is sinking in. ". Well after mulling it over for most of the morning I decided it's probably best to just go back through the import process and get everything set for UDIM from the start. Then go through and get everything set to export to Substance using a blend of the Daz to Substance and Blender to Substance pipelines. 

I would however still like to hear from other people and their experiences with Daz/Diffeo/Blender/whatever texturing and texture painting. More information is always better than zero!

lilweep

tl;dr: OP has some undisclosed issues when texturing above 1k in blender and using UDIMs.  Plus wants advice on Blender to Substance to Blender workflow, but at same time doesnt want to use Substance.

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Btw i dont think you would have to start from scratch doing UDIM workflow, since all existing textures you have would still work, since UVs would still all be the same.

Combining Materials when importing from Diffeo in order to employ a UDIM setup will obviously be much faster for tweaking materials than having material for each UDIM as is the default, as it means you can tweak multiple body regions like all skin surfaces at same time etc.  For G8, i combine the Cornea and Eyemoisture together into one material, Nails together, and Iris,Pupil, Sclera together, basically anything where i have same shader settings.

If you have Geograft that is sharing a UDIM tile with another body part (for example the default anatomical elements will be on 1001, which is the same as head) then what i do is I just change this in Daz before i export to Blender.  To change this, I use custom UV in DazStudio for the geograft which puts the UV on 1008 or wherever is a free UDIM tile.  (InTheFlesh has a youtube video on making custom UV Layout for geograft.)

I dont have much experience texturng in Blender, but I do in Substance Painter. I find easiest way to set up "Live Link" between softwares, is to save out the textures from Substance first time, then hook them up in Blender or Daz Studio.  Then whenever you tweak in Substance and export them again, dont change the file names when exporting, just overwrite the existing files, and because they are already hooked up to Daz Studio/Blender, you will be able to refresh and render them out.

Padone

Just a note. Combining materials and making udims are two completely different things, though the diffeomorphic interface puts them together in the same place. You can make udims without combining materials at all.

hardwire666

Padone said:

Just a note. Combining materials and making udims are two completely different things, though the diffeomorphic interface puts them together in the same place. You can make udims without combining materials at all.

 I found that out yesterday. It's been a while since I messed with those parts of Diffeo. It has gotten a lot better. The geograft made it a bit annoying, Somewhere in the process because the graft UV's got a little mangled but a copy/past from some appended geometry fixed it. Over all, it actually worked a lot better than I remember.  

 

lilweep said:

​ I just change this in Daz before i export to Blender. 

I didn't even know you could do that in daz, good to know. I pretty much do the same thing as you with materials. Essentially same surfaces get the same material. At least when I'm doing the UDIM thing. Otherwise, I just leave them separate. Mostly for the sake of "if ain't broke don't fix it". Also, the reason I was saying "start from scratch" is because I really thought things were going to be much more painful than they were. After messing around with it yesterday I can see how I can adapt my previous work and move forward. As far as the "live link" between substance and Blender I already had that exact workflow in mind. Kind of an old habit.



And thanks to both of you, I do really appreciate the input. I always assume I know nothing and ask questions, because you never know what you might learn

hardwire666

Also just want to add that in the Blender 3.5 beta that came out on the 8th this is no longer an issue. At least for me.

hypercube.vision

hardwire666 said:

My goal is, I am trying to work on texture-based details like fading the spec/clearcoat around the lips, skin micro details, a proper alpha fade on the sclera, better fingernails, and the list goes on. My problem as it stands is that Blender just is not exactly up to snuff. Typically these things don't bother me, it's a part of doing 3D, as well as any kind of Development. You learn to work around the pains, but in this case, I'm just tired of things slowing me down and want results. I accept you sometimes have to just muck around till stuff works. I even accept that it happens a lot of the time. but as a whole, I'm tired of it being all of the time.

 

Oh man, that hit home. I appreceate the long winded post, actually. I'm also fumbling around the dark for the last few months and everything you said resonates. We should link up. My instinct has been pushing me to seek community on these matters somewhere beyond forums. Like a discord. Buddy system ya know. Find me on discord @ floating.signfier#7492, or reddit u/fivespeed - I'm floating around a few different communities here and there.