IDMapper is a Blender add-on that lets you create a vertex color layer that can be used as an ID-map by texture paint tools like Substance Painter.
When creating textures for models you often want to reduce the actual number of textures, for example because your GPU can only handle a limited number of textures or maybe simply because juggling a large number of textures for a single model is such a hassle.
Whatever your motivation, texture painting software lets you apply different materials to a texture with ease but you still need to identify areas. An ID-map makes it very simple to apply a material to faces that have a certain color, often by letting you pick a color from the ID-map with an eye-dropper tool.
You will still need to create the vertex color layer that can be used as an ID-map and that's where IDMapper can help.
The first thing it offers are powerful heuristics to assign a unique vertex color to regions consisting of related faces. What is considered related can be tweaked interactively and any resulting distinct regions with very similar geometry can still be assign the same vertex color, simplifying for example the assignment of colors in hard-ops modelling in situations where your mesh contains repeated features like handles or bolts.
The second feature is an operator that acts like a new face paint mode. Instead of applying blended colors to vertices in a painterly manner as with Blender's vertex paint mode, this operator keeps colors uniform across a face, something often desirable when assign materials to mesh parts. It also lets you assign new colors to colored regions and resize or smooth these regions interactively.
And finally it offers some convenience functions to combine different vertex color layers and copy vertex color layers from one mesh to another, probably more high poly, mesh.
A short video showcasing the main features is available on Youtube:
IDMapper is available in my Blender Market shop
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