This is a rewrite of a post I made in the Polycount forums from back when I didn't have a 1660ti.  I felt that it was rambly and poorly written. Second time's a charm, right?

Substance Painter is the industry standard for texturing, it should be, it's good software, but boy is it unusable for people with low-end hardware. Of course I can't blame the devs, most people who can spend $20/month have decent rigs. But if you're not most people- like I wasn't, I never am ): - then you might find the next few paragraphs very interesting. By the end you'll still want to die, but at least you'll know that because your rig sucks, that doesn't mean your art has to suck too.

My Specs

Some things have changed since I originally wrote this, I now have a PNY 1660ti and 2x 16 gigs of 3200MHz ram

• CPU : AMD Ryzen 2400G 3.6 GHz 4C/8T
• GPU : AMD Vega 11 Graphics
• RAM : 2x Crucial 4GB 2400 Mhz DDR4
• Monitor Resolution : 1366 x 768

The Official Performance Guide

Getting the official advice out of the way...

1. Only activate channels on fill layers that you actually use [source]
2. Make sure the all the layers on top of the one you're modifying are hidden [source]
3. If your PC is prone to crashing when exporting to 4k, Set the TDR Value to 1 [source]
4. Setup your UV shells with the same materials to be close to each other [Source] 

An Unconventional Solution...

While doing these things will definitely make things more bearable. It's still taking you like 2 minutes to add a single stroke in 2k hoping that the barely legible clouds you paint end up making sense once you export to 4k.

There's not much else you can do to make substance painter more bearable in 2k, so let's not bear with 2k, let's make it possible to do detailed work in 1k or 512? Sounds insane? Actually...

• You don't need a bigger map to have a better texel density, you just need bigger UV Shells
• Substance Painter can reproject strokes from one version of your mesh with different UVs or even geometry
• Even your shitty PC can probably run Substance painter decently at 512/1k

if you took one part of your lowpoly, scaled the UV to wombo, then scaled down all the other parts' UVs, you'd have the texel density of a 4k texture, with the performance of 1k. So you do your usual texture magic on that part, then use substance's reprojection tools to put all those details into the version with the final UVs

Even when rewritten, this looks bad, hopefully the next few paragraphs will fix that. And hopefully one day Adobe can come up with a way to just streamline all this, kind of like zbrush's "sculpt HD" feature.

( English actually is my first language, I have no excuses for this, I'm so sorry ): )

Before doing any of these, export your mesh with the final UVs(let's call it the Omega, because I am deep and 21). You're going to do a lot of things soon, you might forget to do this.

Let's say there's this one part of your asset that you can't afford to just cheese with slapping a smart material, like the receiver of an AR15 or an ACOG sight. In this case it's the ACOG, the ACOG is our focused object.

1. Isolate & pack: The focused object has already been separated, so I'll just pack it, as if no other object is there

2. Minify the rest: Resize the UVs of every other object. not delete, substance wont let you re-project to non-existent objects.

3. Pack them all together: You don't want them to overlap, do you?

4. Export: please name them.

I like to broadly texture the Omega to know what I'm working towards when I focus in and detail a single area. So I'll do that then go to "Edit > Project Configuration..."

Once it's done projecting, you'll want an exorcism, but good boys have faith in the substance reprojection algorithm and don't need to worry about your lost strokes or materials, because they know they aren't lost.

You'll also notice that your focused object is a bit off, that's because you'll need to rebake it.  Unless you're stalling for time, I reccommend a simple 1k bake with 2x AA.

Now for the next few hours or minutes that you don't have a GPU from literally 2013. When you're done go to  "Edit > Project Configuration..." menu just like before then load in your Omega mesh, making sure "Preserve strokes on mesh" is ticked

Do one more bake at max quality, make some finishing touches and you should be ready to export.

You know what to do, hit Ctrl + Shift + E then export in 4k. Get some tea or something and try not too think too much about the possibility of it crashing.

So this was at least "mildly inconvenient" maybe a bit "annoying", "soul crushing" even but it's really the only way to get the same quality of art as someone comfortably texturing on their nice GTX 1050 or something.

Things you'll never be able to do

• Use particle brushes
• Use that Photoshop live link
• Exporting in 8k
• Open the .spp files of the 3D bourgoise
• Use any of the more complicated materials

cope

No, this isn’t any different from my post in Blender Artists or the post in tumblr. I just decided to move it here, because no one uses tumblr lmao xd lmao (also took the opportunity to remove some of the cringe)

This is more for intermediate users, I expect that you already know how to uv map, but are curious to know about a few tools you might not have heard of or a few time saving workflows.

Useful plugins

• UV Packmaster 2 Pro ($), I pack my UVs by hand but from the results  seen, this script is as good if not better.
• Tex Tools, absolutely essential for game artists.
• UV Squares ($ but not really it’s on github), not “essential” but it’s a nice time saver.

Useful Tutorials

Chamferzone’s “Unwrap special” & his Machette asset creation tutorial, which is a 100% free from start to finish by the way.  He uses max but if you’re comfortable with 3d you shouldn’t have a problem figuring out what the blender equivalents are.

Polycount wiki this page in particular.

CGBoost’s 20 UV Tips & Tricks

Unique Tips I’ve picked up along the way

Tip - 1, The pin tools exist for a reason.

shocking I know.

But say you’ve got to unwrap something like this pistol grip (the same pistol grip of the amazing oscar nominated krinkov aks 74u you can get it’s autograph here!!!! ) 

  So you place your seams, as you would.   

Then you unwrap only to find….  

Distortion! Might not seem like much but it will(and has) show if  you say… slap a diamond pattern texture on this grip, like i was planning to do.

So what to do now? Go on BA forums and complain?  Convert to using the tools of the ruinous powers?  Not quite yet I have a solution

  Project from view while having the “view”(camera) be perpendicular to the surface. We’re not done yet, this causes another problem,

 This is where the pinning comes in,  

 In your UV Mode, select all the coplanar faces, and hit p(or right click and click pin)  

Then unwrap, and your troubles are no more(for the most part, maybe unpinning some of the edges near the bottom will yield better results.) 

This isn’t where the usefulness stops

Say you’ve watched that Tim Bergholz tut that emphasised that the borders of your UV islands should ideally be straight for perfect baking at any resolution

But what happens when you get a piece like this?  

 With the pin workflow you can fix this no problem 

Tip 2 - Using Materials to keep track of how much texel density each bit needs

This trick I learned recently while modelling a handgun that I haven’t  uploaded  at the time of writing this

But, this whole trick is based on the principle that not every bit needs as much space in the uv map equally, some bits are going to be on the player camera more often so they need more space.

Say this is our prop  

(I wouldn’t put the seams this way in an actual prop by the way, just an example)

  I’ll create 3 materials  

Assign them based on how close you’d expect them to be to the player camera.

After you’re done with that, do the next two steps for each material.

  Select the faces linked to the material. Make sure nothing else is selected

Using the textools addon, set the texel density to the appropriate numbers and apply. in this case I decided,

UV_High (the highest texel density) - 256 UV_Medium - 128 UV_Low - 64

Tad overkill, you’re free to experiment with better values.

After you’ve done all that, select all the faces of the object and pack.

Now most of the detail should be concentrated in the areas where the player will spend the most time looking at.

That’s all for now. It’s worth noting that I’m not ex-ilm,bungie,mlg,etc god modeller, I’m just a random talkative(in public forums behind edgy avatars, god knows I can’t speak irl or in dms) prop artist

So if I get anything wrong, feel free to correct.