Week 3

Class 5

Over the weekend I worked on organizing my scene into texture sets to import into Substance Painter.

I attempted to start texturing this weekend and ran into issues with Substance Painter. Whenever I tried to place a material onto any geometry, it wouldn't load in the viewport or as a thumbnail in the layers panel. After attempting to place a couple different materials, my entire computer would crash. My screens would just turn solid black and my computer would force a restart with no crash or error logs whatsoever. This made me initially think it was a GPU problem. But even after a BIOS update my computer was still crashing. So I was able to recreate the crash a couple times with task manager open to monitor my system usages. Well it turns out that Substance Painter was using up ALL of my RAM (128GBs).

The first thing I did was go in and make sure my VRAM was set up properly. It was. No issue there. The odd thing was that even if I opened the program and didn't do anything my RAM usage would still climb until it crashed. Task Manager would show that Substance Painter was still running in the background even after I closed the program. After digging on the forums, I found a user who said that they were having the same issue due to outdated material files that they had set on auto-load into their shelf. Going off of that information, I renamed the folder that Substance Painter was drawing all its internal files from when it starts up (the one with all my older materials) so that it would make a whole new one when I started it up again. Completely fixed my issue. My RAM now only runs at a solid 5% usage when I had been constantly hitting 98-99%.

My heart and computer are happy now that I can actually start texturing. I just have to make a mental note to never use any of my texture/material resources I've built up. I think this was all part of Allegorithmic/Adobe's hidden agenda to force me to use Designer for everything now, which is good because that's what I've been needing/wanting to do anyways.

Just for fun I've included a weird video of one of my crashes. This was the one and only time I could "do" something while my computer was freaking out.