Exporting PSD files, part 1 - Working with Maps from the Painter Application
[Instructor] Another export option that we have available when working in Substance Painter is that of writing out multi-layered PSD files. In fact, we have not one but two PSD export options open to us, each of which produces very different results. Perhaps the most obvious of these coming in the form of the Export to Photoshop button that we can see on the left of the UI here. Now unlike the exports that we have already written to disc, we aren't talking here about creating straightforward flattened versions of our textures, but rather faithful reconstructions of the entire set of layer stacks that we see at work inside Substance Painter.
Now, you may be wondering why, seeing as we already have Substance Painter with its fantastic tool set available to us, we would ever need to take a fully editable version of our texture into Photoshop. Well, many texture artists these days have worked really hard to develop drawing and painting skills that give them the ability to create textures and texture detail from scratch, as it were. When you combine those skills with the amazing digital paint tools that applications like Photoshop and Corel's Painter have amassed over the years, and then add to those a fully editable set of texture assets from Substance Painter, well, you have a very powerful and flexible set of texturing options with which to work.
It could well be, then, that there are texture artists on your team, or maybe this even describes you yourself, who specialize in adding hand-painted detail to textures, giving them a very unique look and feel. One "gotcha" to be aware of with this approach, though, is the fact that by default, this button will export to the default Documents, Allegorithmic, Substance Painter and Export folders. But, if you have worked through this section of the course in one continuous Painter session, it will at this moment in time actually write to the last used path, which in my case was the Substance Files and Painter folder from the XSI's files download.
Another "gotcha" is that this option will only work if you have Photoshop installed on the same machine as Substance Painter and that you have pointed Substance Painter to the Photoshop.exe file. After clicking on the Photoshop button then, Painter opens up a basic config dialog from which we can choose the material channels that we want to export. Once we click OK, Painter will run through the process of writing out layers and masks for each of the channel types in our texture set.
And once the export is done, which can take quite a while in some projects, Photoshop, assuming you have it installed, that is, should either open up or jump into focus if it is already open, and start adding all of the editable data from the Painter project. Once it is finished, what we should have is a sequence of layered PSD files that correspond to each of the document channels that we were outputting. So, base color, height, roughness, etc., all with their layer stack and mask settings working as they did in Painter.
Now, if Photoshop doesn't run through this automated process once Substance Painter writes the files out, you can force the issue by, with Photoshop open, coming to the File menu and Scripts flyout, and then browsing for and running the .jsx file that Substance Painter will have created. That, as we say though, is only one way in which we can export PSD files from Substance Painter, and one that has a very specific usage, i.e., using a digital paint program to further enhance the work that has already been done in Substance Painter.
Hence the need for all of the layer stacks or texture sets to use Painter speak, remaining intact. What we will look at next, though, is perhaps a more typical scenario in which most of us might want to use PSD files for our textures.