Perforce in Substance Painter and Designer: check out, lock, sync and submit from the Dousen dock
Dousen docks a panel in Substance Painter and Substance Designer. Its Perforce tab shows whether the open file is locked, opened by others or behind the depot, and lets you check out, sync and revert it under your own Perforce user. Published textures go to the Jira task's changelist.
- Substance Painter and Substance Designer each show a docked Qt panel with a Publish and a Perforce tab.
- The Perforce tab has Check Out, Sync & Reload, Revert and Refresh.
- Painter's save-triggered publish runs the Perforce pre-flight; Designer has no auto-publish.
- Textures export as TGA by default, or the format set in
export_presets. - Textures need a target Unreal mesh before they publish.
What changes for artists
Launch the DCC from DousenDesktop. A DCC started from a desktop shortcut has no Dousen panel. DousenDesktop runs on Windows 10 and 11, and tasks come from Jira Cloud.
What Perforce status do the Substance panels show?
Painter shows a docked panel with the tabs Publish, Perforce, Export and Tools. Designer shows a docked panel with Publish, Perforce, Export, Materials and Tools. The Perforce tab shows live status for the open project or package, read with p4 fstat and refreshed about every 30 seconds. The panel header shows the current task and Stream: <name> or Classic depot.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Locked by <user> (CL n) | Someone else has the file checked out exclusively. |
| Opened by <user(s)> | One or more people have it open without an exclusive lock. |
| Locked by you | You hold the Perforce lock, from an exclusive checkout or p4 lock. |
| Not at latest (have r<n>, head r<m>) | Your local copy is behind the depot. |
| Available | Nobody else has the file open or locked, and your copy is current. |
| P4 error: <detail> or Not in Perforce | Perforce can't answer, because the server is unreachable or the file isn't in the depot. |
How do I check out, sync and revert a Substance file?
- Open a project or package saved under your Perforce workspace root, then select the Perforce tab.
- Click Check Out to edit an existing file. It opens in the selected Jira task's changelist, or in
defaultif no task is active. - If the file is behind the depot, click Sync & Reload and confirm. The reload discards unsaved changes.
- Click Revert and confirm to discard your changes to an open file.
- Click Refresh to read the state again.
The docs describe no new-asset setup for either application. Add a new source file in P4V after you save it under a mapped path, or let the publish add the files it creates, which happens after the export.
How do exported textures land in the task's changelist?
DousenDesktop sends the selected task's changelist to both applications. In Painter, Publish exports each checked texture set to the Textures folder under the source root and publishes one texture.export event per set. Designer's Publish bakes the graphs in each package once and publishes one event per checked graph. Dousen opens the scene and your previous outputs for edit in the task's changelist and adds new files after the export. Painter's Publish textures on save checkbox on the Tools tab gives the same handling on save. Designer has no auto-publish. A publish never submits. Follow One changelist per Jira task for that.
The Perforce pre-flight covers Painter and Designer publishes and Painter's save-triggered publish. It doesn't cover Painter's own export dialog or Designer's export-only buttons on the Export tab, and Publish history doesn't list those exports. Check outputs from those paths out yourself if your workspace is read-only. After a restart, the first publish doesn't know the previous outputs either.
What stops a publish in Painter or Designer?
If another user has locked a file the export would write, the publish stops and names the lock in Publish history. Painter and Designer publishes also run the naming check first. Both also refuse a texture format that isn't in texture.allowed_formats, and validation reports an error named Target Unreal mesh when a Painter texture set has no target mesh.
How do the Substance addons load?
DousenDesktop ships both addons and loads them when you launch Painter or Designer from the apps bar, using the executable path in Settings → DCC Apps. The panel appears as a dock. An application started from a desktop shortcut has no Dousen panel, and a running session needs a restart after you update Desktop. Details are in How the addons load, Substance Painter and Substance Designer.
If your studio keeps DCC source files in a separate Perforce repository, possibly on another server, the same buttons act on that repository's server. See Source repositories for the admin binding and the artist workspace.
Related
- Substance Painter and Substance Designer reference
- Perforce in the Dousen docs
- One changelist per Jira task
- Perforce actions in the DCC addons
Dousen is free during the studio beta, with access by request, and free forever for teams of up to 5 users. Request early access.