Interface Overview

Paint tools

Select a paint layer or mask to use the paint tools. 

Plugins

Painter includes several default plugins to help speed up your workflow. 

The Main menu presents you a few different categories and functions:

Contextual Toolbar

Modify the current brush or tool.

In addition to the various tool settings and functions, the Contextual Toolbar lets you control the display of the viewports, such as:

• Hide excluded geometry: Can be used to hide geometry with the geometry mask

• Pause engine computation: Pauses texture updates 

• Viewport mode: 3D only, 2D only or both side by side

• Camera projection mode: Perspective or Orthographic

• Camera rotation mode: Constrained (2 axes) or free (3 axes)

• Render mode: Shortcut to change to rendering mode with Iray. 

3D and 2D Viewports

Paint and view your 3D Mesh.

The 3D viewport displays your 3D mesh and the 2D viewport shows the mesh UVs.  Both viewports show the textures and materials applied to your mesh, and you can paint directly on the mesh or on the mesh UVs.

At the top of the viewport are dropdowns that you can use to display different channels or mesh maps. By default these dropdowns are set to material, which shows the 3D mesh with realistic lighting. Select another option from the dropdown to see that channel or mesh map without lighting. 

The asset panel holds the assets that you can use in the layer stack to create textures and materials:

• With the dropdown, you can filter assets to only see assets belonging to the current project or to a specific library.

• Type any keyword in the search to find a specific asset.

• Use the asset icons to filter by asset type.

The asset panel holds the following asset types:

• Materials

• Smart materials

• Smart Masks

• Filters

• Brushes

• Alphas

• Textures

• Environments

Texture Set List

Displays all Materials IDs of the 3D mesh.

Painter creates a separate texture set for each material ID of an imported mesh. Every texture set has its own layer stack. Click a texture set in the texture set list to switch between layer stacks. From the texture set list you can also turn off visibility of a texture set. 

Layer Stack

Manage and organize your painting layers.

Add layers to the layer stack to build up your material. Each layer in the layer stack can hold information like brush strokes, textures, and effects. The layer stack combines this information to create the textures on your 3D mesh. 

With the layer stack you can hide and unhide layers, group layers, and adjust layers' blending mode and opacity for each channel.

Properties

Modify brush, tool, and layer properties.

The properties window changes depending on your current selection or tool. Clicking on a layer will display its properties. Paint Layers will show the Tool parameters while Fill layers will display the Fill properties. Other advanced methods, such as Layer Instancing, can also display information in this window.

Dock Toolbar

Access any additional windows.

When you close a panel it is docked in the toolbar on the right of the Painter window. To open a panel again, click the panel's icon. Click and drag opened panels to rearrange your workspace. 

What's Next?

You now know all about the interface of Substance 3D Painter. Next, you can try to create your first project.

Have a question or an idea?

If you have a question to ask, come and participate in the Substance 3D Painter community. We would love to hear from you. 

You can also share your ideas of new features with us!