ID Map Creation for Masking within Substance Painter using Zbrush

I wanted to create an ID map for masking within Substance Painter. Frankly Painter should have an easier way to do this built into the program like Zbrush does, but they seem to be improving it often. One method of doing it is to assign a material to each object and then baking it using Maya (or whatever package you are using), but I find this method annoying and time consuming. I don't like dealing with tons of shaders in Maya because then I need a seperate project for substance or it will split it into more parts.

So for this method I'm using Zbrush. Here's what I did...

Start by sending your model to Zbrush with GoZ (*first do all of your UV layout, unless you want to auto-unwrap in Zbrush.)

Next assign a different polygroup to each UV island by hitting the "Auto Group with UV" button:

It might not seem to do anything but if you hit Shit+F you'll see your groups:

Now we want to convert those groups to a texture that we can export. To do this simply hit the "Polypaint from Polygroups" button under the Polypaint menu:

Okay, just about done. Now just need to make a texture from the polypaint. Go down to the texture menu and select "New from Polypaint" under the "create" submenu.

Now we have a texture we just need to save out. In the texture menu you'll find your new texture, select it and hit export and you're done!

If you name it properly then Substance will automatically plug it in. If you want to know how to use it there's loads of documentation out there, here's a link:

https://www.allegorithmic.com/page_element/text_large_media/960


This may be obvious to people, but some may not know how to do it, as I hadn't done it before. If anyone knows how to make actions in Zbrush it would be awesome to get a script that would do all of that in a click, or even for multiple subtools!