Substance Painter Guide/Review

 

1. Pull up Maya, Substance Painter, and material reference

2. Make sure UVS are Good on model

3. Make a dupe of the geo and put to the side. Mesh > Smooth the dupe until it looks like (3 smoothed mode) while on (1). [Make sure the cuts on the UV look the same or just as hidden on the smoothed version as they do on the low-poly version, if not, change the UV’s on the low-poly not the high-poly, and remake the high-poly. Try to plan the UV’s so that all the textures will be facing one direction and to scale.] ….. (going to be creating the maps using this model, then putting the maps on the original)

4. OBJ export the high poly model

5. Drag/drop the OBJ to Substance. Save the project to a directory (consider D drive because Substance creates very large files)

   1. You can change the viewing resolution by going to Texture Set Settings (right of Layers) and selecting the size. By default, Substance Painter should load your model in at 1024 which just keeps your texturing resolution average and speeds up the program, however, the texture will be able to change to a lower resolution if you want the program to be faster, and a higher resolution if you want to check on the details (this will slow down the program considerably). When exporting you can select the resolution you want to export as.

   2. You can change the type of map you view by toggling (B), click (M) to return to Material view

6. Open up Display Settings (Window > Views > Display Settings, if they’re not open by default.) Lower Environment opacity and increase exposure to match the lighting you play to have in your shot. You can change the background hdri to better fit the lighting as well. Use Environment Rotation to rotate the light around your model.

7. Go to Layers and delete the default Layer 1

8. Create a Fill Layer (paint bucket +)

9. Layer on Materials until it looks like the target image. Try thinking about the target material one layer at a time. What does the innermost pristine layer look like? What does the outer layer look like? Try adding imperfections and dirtiness to the outermost layer for realism. [Look at the Smart Materials to see how Substance example materials layers add effects. Sometimes there are Materials on the internet created by other people available for download but often times they’re bad.]

   1. When the fill layer is selected, the Properties window will display Fill adjustments such as Base Color, metalness, roughness, normal map, and height. These are the types of maps that will be exported and can be plugged into Arnold’s standard surface shaders in Maya.

      1. Drag and drop a Substance Material onto the Fill layer. You can customize the Material’s attributes at the bottom under “Technical Parameters.” You can also select/deselect which types of maps you want this Layer to affect.

   2. When a normal/not fill layer is created, the Properties window will display Paint adjustments. These include brush size, flow, opacity, spacing, and all kinds of jitters. You can attach an Alpha to the brush to change the texture without messing up the shape of the brush. At the very bottom you can select which kinds of map to paint and what the effect of the map will be. (ex: Paint on a height map to raise/lower pieces of the model.)

   3. Bake the base layers before layering anything on top, otherwise you can lose detail and sometimes confuse the program??? Go to Texture Set Settings, Right of Layers, and scroll down to Mesh maps > Bake Mesh Maps. Select a finalized resolution you want to bake onto the initial layers (2048 or higher), uncheck ID and hit “bake … mesh maps”

      1. You can find the baked maps in the texture list and apply them to any masks you’d like. This is useful if you want an occlusion map

      2. Also, Generators and several other functions don’t work properly if you don’t bake.

   4. You can specify where a texture will be on the model by creating masks. RMB the Fill layer and select Black mask or White mask.

      1. White mask keeps the Fill layer and allows you to erase away at it

      2. Black mask wipes out the entire Fill layer and painting it will allow it to be visible. If you RMB the black mask, you can add extra effects/ layers upon layers such as fill (like a normal fill layer), layers (like in Photoshop), and Generator.

         1. Generator can create lots of different effects, you can download generators online, but one of the default Substance generators called Metal Edge Wear is really helpful when creating wear/ damage. Go to Properties - Generator and click on “No generator selected” and click on the second to last one. Metal Edge Wear has a bunch of sliders that can be used to control the amount of wear and how close they are to the edges of your model.

      3. Filters- You can right click on a mask and add a filter, filters give you options such as Blur to your fill layer (they don’t work on paint layers)

   5. Paint; there are a lot of different paint functions such as Material maps (metalness, roughness, etc.)

      1. Normals- have “nrm” selected under Materials, and click on “Normal uniform color” and select a normal from there, OR, go to “Hard Surfaces” in the list on the bottom left and select a normal there and drag/drop to the Material. Can adjust the size and angle of the normal stamp under brush settings

      2. Alphas- you can drag anything from Grunges, Procedurals, Textures, and Brushes into the Alpha section.

10. Exporting textures from Substance into Maya

    1. File > export textures

    2. Select the directory, make a folder for this texture specifically

    3. Change the file type to jpg, png, tiff, or exr. Note that exr’s are 32bit files and you’ll need to change the color type from sRBG to RAW in the hypershade for these to work correctly

    4. Change the configuration to Arnold 5 (aistandard)

    5. Change the document size to 2048x2048 or higher

    6. Export

11. Hooking up maps to Arnold shaders

    1. Open the Hypershade

    2. Create an aistandardsurface. Arnold > shader > aistandardsurface. Name it.

    3. Under base color, Weight is not at 1 by default so slide it up to 1. Click on the black and white square under Color to attach the color map. Select “file” on the pop-up window

       1. Click on the file icon and look for the BaseColor file

       2. If the file was an exr, change the Color Space to RAW

       3. Check the “Alpha is Luminance” box to make sure the texture follows the UV’s

       4. You can increase the Exposure, Color Gain/Offset to your liking. Alpha Gain/Offset changes the texture’s placement on the UV

    4. Return to the aiStandardSurface node (the really long one), repeat the hooking up process to the following:

       1. Metalness > Metalness

       2. Specular Roughness > Roughness

    5. Geometry

       1. Bump Mapping > file > 2d Bump Attributes > Use as “Tangent Space Normals”

       2. Click on the arrow box (where the black and white square would be) next to “Bump Value”

       3. Attach the Normal map to this

    6. Height

       1. To the right of the aiStandardSurface node should be a blue node labelled “aiStandardSurface[insert shader name] SG” click on this

       2. Displacement mat. > file > Displacement > Attach the Height map

       3. By default the height map should freak out because Alpha Gain is set to 1 (a really high value for height) Change it to a really low value like .02 or something.

       4. Play around with the Alpha Gain/Offset until it reaches a happy equilibrium. If you want a jumping off point, try using an expression to change the values for you. RMB Alpha Gain’s number box > Create New Expression > Expression: > type in (alphaGain = alphaOffset * -.1) capital/lowercase matters > Create Expression

    7. Subsurface

       1. Subsurface scattering determines how far the light will pierce into a material before bouncing back with the Subsurface color.

       2. Set Weight to 1

       3. Attach the BaseColor map to the SubSurface Color

       4. Change the Radius color to the color you want the inside of your material to glow and change the value depending on how far your want the light to pierce before stopping.

       5. Adjust the Scale to a suitable amount (high scale = more scattering)

 

To be continued:

1. Importing FBX vs. OBJ

2. Project Configuration- Normal map format DirectX vs. OpenGL

3. Subsurface Scattering in Substance Painter