LIMITATIONS
Adobe Substance 3D Painter limitations:
Adobe Substance 3D Painter offers us a bunch of hotkeys that we can use to perform some actions but these are limited so, spGhost offer a wider capability options in order to overcome this limitation.
How does spGhost works?
It search for certain image patterns on the screen in order to recognize buttons, panels and menus.
With this, it positions the cursor on a key area and perform the desired action.
It’s good but not magic
Disclaimer 1: Please note that spGhost perform automated actions replacing your input so please be aware of the loading times that Substance Painter takes sometimes when you make changes (that loading bar at the bottom of the viewport or the thumbnail generation process in big projects)
Disclaimer 2: spGhost works as an overlay and it’s not integrated with the Adobe Substance 3D Painter API so, there are some limitations in it’s functionality (listed below)
You may get a virus warning on the .rar and/or .exe files. That’s because I’m using hotkey listening to perform the spGhost actions (it’s what keyloggers do so, some virus detection software will detect spGhost as a keylogger but, I can assure you that there is nothing to worry about since it’s an isolated and standalone program with no data tracking of any kind). I’m searching a way to avoid this issue in the future. Thank you very much for understanding it!
limitations:
- Custom display scaling settings is not supported. Due that the program uses image and patterns recognition, spGhost will only work with a 100% value on the Windows scaling settings
- spGhost have to be able to “see” what it’s looking for. It won’t be able to find elements that are hidden by it’s own window or other “on top” windows.
- Each action needs a tiny bit of time to perform, it will depends on the complexity of the action (and your screen resolution if you are using the “Full screen lookup” mode).
(You can enable the “Show elapsed time” in the settings to see how much time an action it’s taking in your specific setup) - As it uses the mouse position to perform the actions, spGhost will freeze your mouse input in order to prevent unexpected movement during the actions (obviously it will unfreeze it when it finish!).
- If you have so many channels in the project it may cause issues with the “View mask” and “View Normal” actions.
- Searching content in the shelf: In order to be able to detect stuff from the shelf it have to be preloaded so, if you get an error when trying to select a brush for example, it’s possible that the shelf content was not loaded previously, if that’s the case it will load the shelf content and henceforth will work fine.
- Layer navigation: The “Select previous layer [Alt+Up]” and “Select next layer [Alt+Down]” are not capable to scroll in the layer stack so if you have the first or last showing layer selected and want to select the previous/next one, you will have to scroll up/down manually. Also, if you have the first layer of the visible stack selected and you try to “select previous layer” it may accidentally add a new paint layer.
Pen tablet/display limitations:
- Dragging spGhost around: When using a pen tablet you will notice that, at first you can freely drag the window around but after the first action is fired then you won’t be able to move the window again. To solve that issue you can refresh spGhost by clicking F11
- !!BIG LIMITATION: Due to a windows limitation it’s impossible to freeze the pen tablet input (since it’s a relative input) so, when pressing an action button it’s possible to confuse the program with our input so be aware of the movements made with the pen while an action it’s running (so sorry about this one I know it’s a big limitation and I’m working hard to find a solution!! 🙂
If you find a bug or something is not working as expected you can report it, I’ll much appreciate it!!