Substance Painter Connector Plugin Installation

This guide is applicable for both Windows and macOS, depending on what version of Substance Painter and OS you have, your UI may be different, but the process is the same.

Step by Step Instructions

1) Download the Connector plugin (Beta) for your Substance Painter version from here.

Important Note: Connector plugin is in Beta phase and compatible with Substance Painter 10.1.x and up.

2) Extract the downloaded "GreyscalegorillaStudioConnectors.zip" file.

3) Browse into the extracted folder, SubstancePainter > GreyscalegorillaSubstancePainterConnect and copy the "modules" and "plugins" folders.

4) To access Substance Painter plugins folder you can run Substance Painter and go to Python menu then click "Plugins Folder".

5) Then paste into the plugins folder. Confirm that you install to this path:

(Windows) C:\Users\Username\Documents\Adobe\Adobe Substance 3D Painter\python

(macOS) \Macintosh\Users\Username\Documents\Substance Painter\python

Important Note: Installing the plugin into a different directory might cause problems and it may not work properly.

6) After you finished copying, you can go back to Substance Painter > Python menu and click "Reload Plugins Folder"

7) When you check the > Python menu again you will see the "Greyscalegorilla Studio Connect".

Click on it to enable the connector and you will see a checkmark, which indicates it's loaded.

8) Then launch Greyscalegorilla Studio App and select Substance Painter as 3D Application from settings then close settings window.

Renderer: Automatic ( detects the setting from your scene file)

8) Click "Connect" button. The button color will change to green and show it's connected to Substance Painter. Now you can send and use the assets from Greyscalegorilla Studio.

Important Note: The plugin uses port 8914 by default to communicate with Studio. If you experience any issues, you can change the port number. The available port numbers range from 1024 to 49151.

The port number setting needs to be changed in Studio > Settings > Advanced and also updated to the same port number in modules\greyscalegorilla\version.py file.

Usage

In Painter, open or create a project
In Studio, Send any material

You should see the material applied as a fill layer on the top of the stack of the currently selected model.

Known limitations

Materials that are not supported in Substance Painter:
- Patterned Canvas Collection
- Glass and Liquid materials
Models can not be sent to Substance from Studio.
Some materials that in other DCC require setting up the shader graph with auxiliary nodes, for example Puzzlematte, will not match the expected behaviour. For now we just create the needed channels in the layers, and apply a texture to them, or the constant values if defined as standard_surface parameter in the gsgm file.
The format of the channels (8/16 bit, color/greyscale) may be incorrect.

Custom Plugins Folder

When providing a new location to load plugins, the application expect a specific folder structure with three sub-folders. Python script located outside of those folders or under different names will be ignored.

The three following folder are required:

modules (Utility modules, shared across plugins)
plugins (Modules that are loaded as optional components)
startup (Modules that are always loaded at application startup)

To specify a custom location simply use the SUBSTANCE_PAINTER_PLUGINS_PATH environment variable to specify the custom folder. The folder path should point to the root location where are the three previously mentioned folders.