How To/Muti-materials on a single object with Substance Painter

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Substance Painter (hereafter referred as SP) is a very powerful tool to create realistic textures for your models. But it suffers from two limits.

The first one occurs when on a single object, you want to apply several materials. SP will then export as many set of texture files (albedo, parameters and normal) as there are materials. Yet you only need one albedo file, one normal file,... Luckily, there is a way to work around the problem : this solution is explained in a first section of this 'How To'.

If you apply the proposed solution, you will then encounter the second limit of SP : when you use a 'smart mask' on a specific material, this mask will affect ALL the used materials. This time also, there is a solution, exposed in the second part of this 'How To'.

Several materials on a single object, but only one set of exported texture files

Imagine a house you have just modeled with DSMax or Blender. It's a single object. To texture it, you will apply a 'roof tiles' material on the roof, a 'plaster' material on the wall, etc... SP will export as many set of texture files that there are materials : 'roof tile' albedo, 'plaster' albedo, 'rooftiles' normal,....(to see in detail the export settings for Trainz : Substance Painter Export Preset )

If we want to export just one set of texture file, what shall we do ?