From the course: Substance Painter 2019 Essential Training

Using vertex color to prepare ID map - Substance Painter Tutorial

From the course: Substance Painter 2019 Essential Training

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Using vertex color to prepare ID map

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- [Instructor] Creating masks is always a vital part of the texturing process. Substance Painter allows you to create masks in various ways. One of the ways that we can work with masks very easily is to create what's referred to as an ID map. Now, later in the course in the baking section, we're going to bake an ID map. And there's different ways you can do that. So in the previous video we talked about creating material ID. So for example, here I have parts, and I have this part. Now, if I were to come over here to the material and set a color value for this, let's just say it was green, in my baker within Substance Painter, I can choose to create an ID map based on the material color. And so that would then give me an ID map that allows me to create masks very quickly. And again, we're going to cover that once we get into the course in the later stages. Now, that's a great way to work, however, that's going to require me to create many different materials. So for example, if we take a look here at the parts where I have all of these different knobs. Now, here I have these dials where I have red. And the top, I have this purple-ish pink. What I'm trying to do here is separate out these objects so that I can easily apply a different material. So here for the red section, I want to apply a plastic. And here for the top, I want to have an aluminum or a metal. And so I could select the faces here and assign different materials to that. Now as you recall, in the previous video, a material is going to become a texture set in Substance Painter. And you may want to work that way, or you may want to divide up your project that way. However, for each texture set you're going to get a set of textures. So, depending on the type of project you're working on and how many sets you want to work with. So for my case in this example, I wanted to have just a few texture sets. Meaning that I have just three materials. Now, I do have three mesh parts. That doesn't matter, either. All this could be in one mesh, and then I could select just different faces and assign a material to it. But in my case, like I said, I have just three materials. However, I have a lot of parts that I want to be able to mask. So one of the ways that I find that really works well is to, instead of relying on the material color for my ID bake, I can actually create vertex colors. And that's precisely what I've done here. So for example, you can see if we take a look. Here we have just the parts here. So parts. All of these items are just one material. Again, this is going to be one texture set list. Here, just so we can really visualize this, let's just hide everything else and let's look at this. So we have this single part. And I have one material assigned to it. So I know that all this is going to get one texture set. However, I'd like to find a way to really go in and mask out all these different little spots by just using a simple ID map. So what I like to do is just go into my vertex paint and assign vertex colors that I can then use as my ID. Now, later when we're talking about the baking, we're going to use the ID baker to bake vertex colors, and create this ID map for us. And as you'll see, this allows us to really easily create masks within Substance Painter. So here we get what I would say is a more optimized way to work, because we've minimized the amount of materials we're creating. However, we get a lot of variation for IDs by just using vertex color. And that's the way I've set up this project. So, like I said, later when we get into the ID map, you'll now have a better understanding of where those vertex colors are coming from.

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