Does anybody have experience to share using the automation tools in substance painter in a production pipeline? Is it possible to, say, set up a procedure for exporting files packed according to a particular engine requirement, or to create a one-step high-res/low-res pipeline? How good is the scripting, and is it a good citizen in a studio environment?
I have a lot of experience in this area. SAT is really good but deals only with Substance Designer and SBS / SBSAR files. Substance Painter is much more difficult to do much with in terms of tooling as it has a highly restrictive javascript API.
Setting up an export step to pack your texture channels specific to your engine requirements is very easy, you can actually do it as an export preset through the user-facing UI and requires zero scripting (as long as you don’t want to do anything more complicated like atlasing).
The scripting interface in Painter is pretty weak overall and requires a lot of workarounds to do many of the things you’d find useful. It’s generally hard to support from tooling / pipeline perspective but it’s an amazingly powerful tool for artists.