Understanding texture sets and settings - Substance Painter Tutorial

- [Voiceover] In this video, we're gonna take a look at texture sets. So here you can see that I have my UI, and as I indicated in a previous video, I've closed all of the viewports. So here we have underneath window, we have views and we have all these viewports here, and I've closed everything so that we can have this nice, clean, UI as we work. Now here, on the far right of the UI, we have our toolbar which lists the views. So at the very top we have a button here, and this is our texture set list. So if I click this, it expands the texture set list. And here you can see that we have what looks like a layer editor with a bunch of sets. Now, a texture set in substance painter is merely a material ID that you set in your 3D program. So for example, here I am in Maya, and we have this front loader mesh. Here in the hypershade, you can see all of the materials there have been assigned to polygons, or mesh parts here inside of maya. Now, like I said, each one of these materials, when imported into substance painter becomes a texture set. So for example, here we have this arm. Now if we jump back over to painter, you can see that this arm material becomes a texture set. Again here we are in substance painter, and at the very top of the texture set list, you can see that we have arm. Now I can turn the visibility on and off for this texture set, or I can choose to solo this texture set completely. Here in the 3D view I'm going to hit f to kind of frame this up and again use my keyboard shortcut alt right mouse button to zoom in. So here I'm viewing just the texture set, which again is the material of arm that's assigned to this mesh here, this was done in my 3D program. So again, here we have the arm, let's just un-solo this again I'll hit f to kind of, focus the view for the entire asset. Okay so now we know that we have these texture sets, and they're essentially just material ID's. Now each one of these texture sets can have a shader associated with it, So you can see for example each texture set is using the same shader which is just called main shader by default. And I can choose to create an instance of this shader, which we will do in a future video. Now, another thing that's important to understand, is that each one of these texture sets is going to have its own set of settings, as well as its own layer stack. So for example, I have this texture set list. I can here in the UI just simply left click and drag this window out so I can keep this as like kind of like a modal pop-up view, or I could choose to dock this anywhere I like. So in my case, I'm just going to just left click and drag this texture set list window and dock it here on the left side of the UI. Now, I'm going to open up my texture set settings, and that is going to be this next button that we see here, so I'm going to click the settings, and now we have these texture set settings. So like I said, for each texture set, we're going to have a set of channels, a resolution setting, as well as any bake mesh maps that we can associate with this particular texture set. So for example, like I said earlier, we're using here the main shader, which is going to be that PBR metallic roughness shader. Now, the texture set here has a set of channels, which for the PBR metallic roughness shader, is going to be base color, height, rough, metal and normal. Now, I can add additional channels to this as well if I need to by clicking this plus button. Here let me just pull this texture set window out, so we can make sure, actually I didn't mean to dock it there so if it actually gets docked you can just left click and drag here to un-dock that, and then of course you can re-size these windows however you need them to be. Okay so again let's go back here to this channel, I'll click this plus button and we can see we have a list of channels that I could add to my texture set settings. So for example, lets say that I wanna work with an emissive channel, I could simply add this emissive channel here. Now in the case of this asset, we're not gonna do that, so I'm just gonna remove the channel by just clicking this minus button here. Okay so we have out texture set list, and we have our texture set settings. So now lets take this window and I'm going to just left click and drag and drop and dock this here, into my UI's, so now I have this left side panel that contains my texture set settings as well as the texture set list. And like I said, the substance painter UI is very pliable so you can set it up to work however you would like. Now, one more thing to talk about is our layer stack. So over here on the far right tool bar, we have the layer stack, so I'm going to left click to open this up, and so here we can see that we have the arm texture set, which again is just a material ID in our 3D program, this texture set has its own set of settings, which means it has its own channels, it has its own resolution, it can have its own shader, it can have its own set of bake maps, and it can also have its own layer stack. So as we start to create our materials and texture here in substance painter we will be creating layers in the layer stack for a given texture set. Okay so before we close out this video, I want to talk to you about navigating the texture sets. So it can be very simple, we can come in here and we can just left click on a texture set to choose the texture set and like I said once we select it, we're gonna get a new set of settings, as well as a layer stack that we navigate to. However, we can also use a keyboard shortcut to quickly navigate between these texture sets. So here I'm just going to use my keyboard shortcut again, the alt right mouse button to kind of zoom in, and again I'm using alt middle mouse to pan. So lets say that I wanna select this arm piece here. Well if I hold down the keyboard short cut control alt and then right click, I can easily select the texture set wherever my mouse is hovered over. So for example, let's select the tires here. So I'm gonna move my mouse over the tire, control alt right click, and here we can see, well it's covered up so let's scroll our texture set down, here we've selected the tires, and then I'm going to click the solo button, and now we can work directly on this solo-ed tires texture set. So the key takeaway to understand from this video, is that a material ID that you create in your 3D program, when you import in that mesh into a painter project, it will take those material ID's and generate a texture set. The texture set has a shader associated with it, as well as a specific set of settings, which include resolution and channels, and each texture set has its own layer stack. And here within the layer stack, is where we're going to be doing all of the texturing work throughout this course.