Paint Across UV Tiles (UDIMs) in Substance Painter

Supercharged texturing for all

The point of the UV Tiles workflow is to allow you to deal with much higher resolutions. In order to support this, we’ve had to roll up our sleeves, and tinker with many aspects of Substance Painter. As a result, we’re coming out of this new release with many ways to make your texturing workflow faster, lighter — better.

• Open large files faster: viewport textures computation launches when you select the texture set you want to work on.
• Save your project at least 30% faster, as we’re saving only what has changed since your last save.
• Bakes load asynchronously. They also take less space! Your files are on average 20% lighter.
• When you’re working on a mask, in the viewport, we’re only updating the mask, and not the texturing.
• Export your textures at least 60% faster.

You can also take matters in your hands, and gain time by pausing computation. Multiple costly actions – like the application of several smart materials on a complex project – will be queued, until you un-pause computation, which triggers calculations.

New workflow, familiar interface

So, this is it, your first new UV Tiles project in Substance Painter. To set it up, you can just opt-in the UV Tiles (UDIMs) workflow and use your .FBX or Alembic mesh with UDIMs.

You can get creative right away – or you can import a UDIM image sequence. Once you have imported your resource, just drag and drop it in your new fill layer, and voilà! Each texture will automatically be assigned to its respective tile.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3420332?autoplay=true

For more details, here’s a tutorial:

https://youtu.be/mUjE8IE3J_k

You’re all set up to work.

Yes, the UV Tiles workflow is new, but you will find that it’s designed to be familiar. Basically, if you know your way around Substance Painter, you should be able to carry on fairly easily.

Baking is a good example of that. Get better control over your bakes by choosing specifically which texture set or UV Tile to bake.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3420333?autoplay=true

More details about baking in this tutorial:

https://youtu.be/mEdwmSV0ZOM

All right. Now we’re entirely set up, and ready to…

Get painting!

It’s as simple as that: grab a brush, and paint. In the UV Tiles workflow, you can (obviously) paint from one tile to another. Like so:

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3420334?autoplay=true

And while we’re having fun, why not play with 🔥 particles across UV Tiles! 🔥

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3420335?autoplay=true

Of course, you can use your favorite generators across UV Tiles as well. They will behave exactly as you’d expect them to: apply your generator across UV tiles and see your entire asset get seamlessly shiny. Or dirty, we’re not judging.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3420336?autoplay=true

Don’t want to paint on a UV Tile? The UV Tile Mask allows you to discard a tile or more. Masking a UV Tile is also a great way to optimize your workflow, if you find you’re working with a very complex or very large project. You can also use this feature when a UV Tile gets in the way of painting.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3420337?autoplay=true

Have more questions about texturing in Substance Painter’s UV Tiles workflow? We made a tutorial.

https://youtu.be/YbZvyvhX7PM

All right, you’re all done texturing. Now, let’s get those renders on the way.

Export your work

Exporting is just as simple. All the export presets have been updated to make sure your textures will be named properly with the UDIM convention. Everything you export is ready to import in any renderer or engine that supports UDIMs, such as Arnold in Maya or the latest version of Unreal Engine 4.

Artwork by Damien Guimoneau

Here’s a quick tutorial to help you export your textures:

https://youtu.be/2WG4BaNdrnQ