Problem:

Specific data was needed for a shader effect I created to pulsate square ‘chunks’ of a character outwards. The shader expected one color channel (green) to hold the pulse influence amount and another channel (blue) to store an ID value.

However, manually coloring the squares was extremely time consuming, and it wasn’t possible in Maya to apply random ID values in the blue channel.

Solution:

The tool allows you to color square chunks with the desired green influence value while it automatically generates the blue ID values as you go. A hotkey sped up the painting, and both vertex and face modes were added.

Further iterations of this tool supported mesh updates by re-applying a baked version of the vertex color map using the new UVs of the tweaked mesh.

Problem:

While using materials published from Substance Designer (.sbsar files) in a material library for Substance Painter, it became clear that everytime a Designer material graph was updated, it would have to be manually re-published to get updated for use in Painter.

Solution:

I created a Python script to navigate through a specific folder hierarchy, identify certain graphs through naming conventions, and finally publish the respective .sbsar files. The script also renamed the files appropriately based on my needs and checked them out in Perforce. This script also wrote to detailed log files.