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- Version 11.0
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Mesh and UV setup
Sub-meshes quantity
Performance should remain comfortable when importing a mesh that has fewer than 8000 sub-objects. Going over this limit can impact the viewport and painting performance. If this limit is reached, we recommended merging objects together to reduce the rendering overhead.
Polycount
The viewport of Substance 3D Painter should be able to render meshes up to 10 million triangles. However the performance is heavily dependent on the computer's installed GPU.
Meshes with very few polygons, for example, a single quad to define a plane, can negatively impact painting performance. This is because the texture engine uses the Polygons to know which part of the mesh should be rendered to compute the brush strokes. Meshes with a very low Polycount can be fully re-rendered even with tiny brush strokes which can quickly saturate the GPU. We recommended subdividing low-poly meshes to avoid this issue.
UV Organization
UV islands can impact painting performance. The texture engine works by dividing a texture/channel into smaller chunks to speed up computation. However, this optimization is made useless if painting on a mesh in the 3D view results in changes across the entirety of the texture. Grouping UV islands together so that islands that are close to each other on the model are also close to each other in UV space helps to improve performance.