Day 11 – Exporting
Today we are looking at expectations when exporting out of Adobe Substance 3D Modeler. After you have a raw sculpt you are going to want to add texture, paint or somehow render the 3D form. I have a feeling this will start to answer my question about resolution and scale. If you have to export to a mesh to use a 3D form in Painter, then that is like rendering a vector file in Illustrator to more of a finalized file, like a PNG or JPG. These are my thoughts at this point and they are on the table for discussion.
Either way, this is Adobe so, as you can imagine, there are a ton of export options.
How to Export
This is the last video from the Basics series on Adobe Substance Modeler.
Output
Export Units Used
This is the same as importing. Currently, you go to the File drop-down and select “Export”, or (Ctrl+Shift+E).
Export Format
There is a long list of files you can export to:
- FBX
- GLB
- GLTF
- OBJ
- USD
- USDA
- USDZ
- USDC
I am curious about which of these files works better for what purpose or for which other programs. I suppose that will be a follow-up topic that I will discover later in my 30-Day+ 3D learning journey.
Export Units Used
Here is my answer to my scale question. When you export you can set Unite Scale. It looks like Modeler defaults to Meters currently and has many other measurement units. I wonder how specific you can be here.
Export Unit options:
- Millimeters
- Centimeters
- Meters (default
- Kilometers
- Inches
- Feet
- Yards
- Miles
Export Content
This is a nice option that will reduce a lot of duplicating and editing files.
Export Content options:
- All Layers
- Selected Layer
Topology
This function is a new concept to me but it really makes sense that you would need to choose how the surfaces are created.
Polygon Type
Raw Triangles – This will give you the densest polygon mesh. So this is a good place to start because this will help you retain the most resolution when rendering out to a usable file. The downside to this would most likely be larger file sizes as is the case with higher resolution.
Triangles and Quads – This Topology will allow you to select a target of the density of the polygons (poly count) on a slider.
UV-mapped Triangles – This option will give you a re-meshed output with automatic UVs.
Now I am going to be completely honest here and share that I wasn’t really clear on what UV-Mapped Triangles meant. I found some information on what a UV map is and it appears to be just a 2D representation of a 3D object. Like when you get a kit toy plane printed on a perforated card stock and you pop it out and fold it on the lines to build a 3-dimensional toy. Or another example of a UV Map would be this one of a true globe of Earth:
For a more relevant example of UV-Mapping, I found this tutorial on how to do this in Photoshop and Illustrator which really helped me wrap my head around this. (See what I did there? Wrapping a 2d image around a 3D space… eh? Wrap my head … anyway)
Optimize for…
Hard Surface – better used for flat planes and sharp corners.
Organic – Better used for rounded edges, less rigid, amoeboid shape.
The video stated that the hard surfaces option really gives a better resolution than just the triangles option mentioned first at the top under Polygon Type.
Additional Options
Overall these are options that will be available or not depending on how you export. For example, you can export with instances normally, but you can not export with instances if you are using the UV-Mapped Triangle option as your Polygon Type.
Work Cited
I created these scenes directly after learning from this video
From this playlist:
Improvement Dave 