Hey there!
I need help using vertex colors as a color ID in armor paint.
Is it possible to apply this blender to substance painter workflow in armor paint?
I appreciate your help. I am very much stuck at this.
Hi Nilsomov,
(As a new member, the forum will only allow me to upload a single image per post, unfortunately).
It looks like ArmorPaint can only handle Color IDs in the form of a png image. In my experiments, I created a mesh composed of two cubes in Blender version 3.6, applied a material and UV unwrapped the mesh.
Next, in Vertex Paint mode, I selected the “Vertex Selection” option.
Then I used the various selection modes (Box select, select all, select none etc) to select the vertices I wanted to paint and applied the desired colour.
I exported the mesh in FBX format.
I dragged the FBX into ArmorPaint and ticked the “Parse Vertex Colors” box.
In the “Bake” window, I selected “Vertex Colors” and pressed the “Bake” button.
This created a “Layer1” in the “Layers” pane.
When switching over to the “ColorID” window, however, there was only the option to import a texture to use for Color IDs.
This being the case, I right-clicked on “Layer1” and selected “Export”.
In the popup window, I chose the “base_color” option.
I opened the resultant PNG file in Gimp and made certain that each UV island was flood filled with a single solid colour without any variations.
This was to combat the effect of ArmorPaint only filling random parts of the mesh when I tried to use ColorID with the texture generated by ArmorPaint based on Blender’s vertex paint. (The days of flood fill are no longer with us, unfortunately).
Back in ArmorPaint, I clicked on the “Import” button at the top of the ColorID window and imported the edited PNG file. Then I clicked on the mesh and the “Picked Color” was activated.
It’s still tricky to get the right material to apply to the correct section of the mesh, however. I think that ArmorPaint requires the user to pick the color ID and also the required material in the “ColorID” window before proceeding to the “Paint” window… Not hugely intuitive, to my mind.
Anyway, I hope my experiments help you to keep your pipeline working with ArmorPaint. I like this software, but it certainly has quirks.
Hey flybynyt.
thank you for your thorough answer. You are very helpful!
I figured out that this vertex paint workflow wouldn´t work and went back to creating normal color ID Maps in Blender by selecting faces and painting them onto the UV map.
Sadly, it seems like armor paint only allows for one color ID map per model. Maybe this is a normal thing (I wouldn’t know. I am quite new at this).
Yes, the software certainly has quirks. It is still great to dabble with texture work outside of blender and substance painter (expensive!) though 