A Beginner's Guide to Substance Painter

what's up everybody my name is Kyra and welcome to a beginner's guide to substance painter so today what we're going to be doing is we're going to be working through a texturing project from start to finish and I'm going to be walking you through the basic workflow that we're going to be using the UI elements and all the different neat little tricks that we can use with substance painter so without any further ado let's get started this is the screen that you're going to be presented with when you open up substance painter this is the default UI I generally don't like to use the Shelf down here so I'm going to close that for the moment and I'll explain the function of the shelf at a later stage so for now what we want to do is we're going to go file and new project and now the template we're going to be using is heavily dependent on what you would like to use these textures for by default it's set to Unreal Engine 4 presets however you can change this to a variety of other presets the Unreal Engine 4 preset uses the PBR metallic roughness workflow if you're not familiar with PBR it stands for physically based rendering and I'm not going to spend too much time explaining it in this tutorial that is certainly a different topic altogether so if you're interested in reading more about that to be feel free to check out wares McDermott's book on PBR rendering it can be found on the substance website as shown here so we're going to be using the ue4 template and now we want to select the mesh that we're going to be using for the project so you just hit select over here and I'm going to be using this elder dragon mesh the high poly version which can be found on sketchfab and all credits must be given to the artist Eon who created it and it's really really nice model so I was looking forward to texturing it so here we have the doc document resolution which is of course the size of the images that you're going to be exporting for each of your output Maps it's set at a 2k resolution for the moment we're going to keep it like that but keep in mind that this can be changed at a later stage the rest of these settings we're going to leave for now the mesh maps and the bake Maps can be imported at this stage however if you don't have them baked at this moment like I don't we are going to leave it for now so we just can hit okay and our model will import so here we have our model so this is the low poly version of the model that we're going to be working on but of course we're going to be needing to bake the mesh Maps but first before we get to that I just want to go through a few of the viewport navigation settings so that you have a bit of familiarity with that to work through with them so I'm holding down alt on my keyboard and left clicking to rotate the view of my model you can hit shift to snap it to any of these orthographic views and then I can hold down shift and the right mouse key to change the light source I'm not going to be going through all of the shortcut-keys for substance painter there are a lot of them I'm just going to be using the ones that you would most often and commonly use however if you hold down ctrl on your keyboard you will see that this context menu does pop up which gives you a little bit of a better idea of all the different shortcut keys that you can use so what we're going to do is I want to show you the different views that are available over here I'm currently in the 3d view we can go to 3d and 2d view which shows you both your UV and your model on the same viewport if you hit F it will zoom out to fit the whole model inside your screen and the same with the UVs you can also go to f3 which will give you just your 2d view or f2 which I was in which is just your 3d view this all depends whether you want to be painting directly onto your UVs or onto your model directly so now that you have a bit of a better idea of how the viewport works let's talk about the tabs that we have available here so on the right hand side over here we have the texture list you can either choose to view or not view your model over here depending on how it's divided up if your model is divided into different materials all of the materials will be listed here and you can preview them one by one if you so desire but our model is just made up of one UV sheet and one material so I'm just going to close the texture set list we don't need it for now and we might want to use the extra screen space so here we have our layer stack which is very similar to photoshop if you've ever used that it just has the list of all our different layers and those can be also viewed separately or together for now though we're going to go to our texture set settings where you can see all the output channels which we have available to us at the moment we can add to these but for now we're just gonna stick with the default settings this is where we're going to bake our mesh Maps if you scroll down over here you can see that none of our mesh maps have been baked so none of them are available over here so what we want to do is we're going to go bake mesh maps and this screen will pop up which allows us to apply the settings we want to for our baking so these are all the texture outputs they're going to be created as a result of the bread after the baking process but for now we're not going to use the color map ID one the high poly model that the artist created for this mesh did not have any poly groups in ZBrush or whatever he used to create this model so it doesn't have any color map IDs so you can choose the output size over here it's better to rather choose a higher resolution now and then down scaled at a later stage but I think 2k should suit our purposes for now we're going to keep the diffusion settings as default and you do have the option to bake a low poly mesh as the high poly mesh it will just apply some ambient occlusion and different settings and outputs based on the low poly mesh but we actually do have a high poly mesh which is this one over here so you're not actually loading the high poly mesh it's just referring to the file so we're not going to use a cage because we don't have a cage file so we'll leave those front-and-rear distances as defaults the only thing I do want to change now is I want to change match to by mesh name the reason for this is this mesh of this dragon is not one contained mesh is actually made up of multiple different meshes and I don't want all the different meshes to affect the other measures when baking so for example if I were to keep this as always the teeth would contribute to the ambient occlusion and the normal map of on the lower jaw over there so the model has multiple different meshes so we're going to match them by mesh name so we're going to bake our mesh maps and after a while this pop-up box will finish and you can just carry on okay so it doesn't take too long baking a 2k so you can just hit okay and you can see the result of the baking that has taken place you can definitely see the difference between the two but now maybe we'd like to see the contribution that each of these maps has towards our model so you want to be able to view your output channels separately so if you could look over here and click down you can see that I'm currently viewing material but what you can do is you can also click down to view just the base colour of which we currently don't have one and the height and the roughness and all of those which of course we won't have any of those outputs yet because we haven't changed them but you can also go to the mesh maps and view ambient occlusion ID which as I mentioned we don't have normal world space normal curvature and all those fun maps then you can hit M on your keyboard to go back to the show material view you can also hit C on the keyboard to cycle through your materials however this will only cycle through your it'll only cycle through your single channels not your mesh maps then you can hit m at any time to go back to your material okay so let's get started let's go to our layer of view and I want to delete this current layer because I want to explain the difference between two very fundamentally different types of layers that we get so up top you'll see we have various different things that we can add over here so the first two ones that I want to talk about are the full layer and the paint layer so first of all let's talk about a paint layer so I'm going to add a new paint layer over here and then you can see that I need to go down in my properties and I need to assign the some properties so over here you can see in this view over here you can see that now when I paint it will affect the color the height the roughness the metallic and the normal you can select these as you wish so for example if I want this layer to only affect my base color I can only have that and then you can see that the inputs disappear or you can have it affect everything so now if I were to go ahead change the color to red now if I go ahead now you can see that I can now paint on my surface let's talk through a few of the tablet settings that we have over here if you happen to be using a tablet like I do so you can see at the top over here we have a pen pressure or sensitivity setting so I can draw very softly or hard and it will affect the size of my alpha and you can also set this to flow so if I draw softly it'll also fade out the intensity and softly will do and hard will do the opposite for neither I prefer to keep the flow off and the size on so now you can go up to here and change the size of your alpha or you can hold down control and move your mouse left and right while holding down on the right mouse button if I hold down control here you can see control plus rights change tool size but like I said I'm not going to go through all of those just the very common ones you can also hold down control and move your mark right mouse button up and down to affect the hardness and then I believe you can rotate it with ctrl and left mouse but of course these are all things that you may not even need but now let's talk about the Alpha which is currently what we are painting with so if I right click right now we have all of these paint properties just previewed over here but they are now just on my screen for ease of access so is exactly all of the same settings so now what we wants to do is this is our stroke or rather our brush so we can change all of these settings over here for now though we're not going to worry about those and let's go to the alpha tab so now this affects what you are painting with your paintbrush so to speak so now I can choose from all the different preset alphas that substance has so for example there we go I now have this alpha to use so you can change all of these different alphas all of these different settings by right-clicking and changing all of them but of course now I'm just going to use the shape alpha it's the default and it's the easiest to use so that's a that's a pink layer what you can do with a paint or a full layer which I'll cover quickly now is you can use a stencil so as the name implies you can choose any of these alphas and let's find something like this the stud spots and now you can see that the stencil is projected over your mesh and this allows you to paint only inside the white areas so you know you can see no matter how much I paint no matter how much I move my back my brush around it's only going to paint inside of those designated areas you okay so let's turn the stencil off so that is the pink layer but now I'm going to explain to you why the paint layer paint layer isn't so often used inside substance painter so now this is my paint layer it's just quickly renamed this you can rename all of your layers as you would similarly in Photoshop or another simple program I'm just going to switch between my tablets and my mouse quite a little bit so there might be a little bit of delay so this is our paint layer so now you can see that if we turn this off and on the effects of that layer are displayed on on our mesh so now I'm going to add a full layer and I'm going to explain to you why I think a full layer is a lot more it's a lot more efficient and it's a lot more you're able to change things more efficiently with a full layer so let's change how to fill and you cannot see because the full layers on top of our paint layer that we cannot see our paint layer what we can do is we can drag this layer down so now that the paint layer is on top so let's go to our full layer and now the obvious difference between the two is I do not need to paint with my faul there we can just do things automatically so I'm going to make this very rough and also metallic so you can see how all the different properties are changed here so the advantage to the full layer is that now I carry on working I add some more layers and I change all of these I change all of these properties then I carry on working later and I've deleted some things now I decide oh I don't want this shiny green metallic dragon I want him to be a little bit rougher and I don't want to be metallic so now we can go in and easily change those values and the whole process becomes a lot more iterative and you're able to change things much more quickly without having destroyed half your work so essentially it's a non-destructive process however my paint layer I can go in and I can paint some more but I cannot change the properties of the things that I've already painted so for example if I change this color to blue or purple it doesn't change the properties of the things that you've already placed on your mesh so for that reason I find full layers with the use of masks which we're going to be talking about at a later stage I think find them so a lot be a lot more productive than a paint layers what you can do on your paint layer though is you've once we erase what you've done you can go to the erase tool over here and you can erase as you will so that's the basic difference between the paint and the full layers so now what we're going to do is let's talk about the full layer quickly but what we're going to do with the full layers well let me first of all delete this paint layer because as I said I don't like to use them for a full layer what you can do is you can use the material mode for a full layer so for example I want this dragons be made of gold so now you can use the various different materials that have been provided with substance to allow you to quickly change and iterate upon your design so for example I can search gold and now I click on this and the gold preset has been a pro has been applied to our model and then you can change the various parameters for that gold so now let's say I wanted to change this to what else do we have we are skin over here so we have lots of different skin presets so let's go human force forehead skin I mean it doesn't look very good but then again it's a dragon not pay human so now we have various different options that provides to us through this materials for so for example we can change the skin color we can change the roughness and all the different parameters that have been provided through this material for example maybe I don't want to use the roughness from the skin I want to use it from something else so I could just click off that roughness I could change that height or I could not use the color if I want to and then we also have the full projection settings and UV settings over here so for example let's use something that's quite noticeable here so let's go I think there's an aluminium aluminium insulator so what if I want to change the scale of this over here perhaps I want them to be a lot smaller I can go up and change the scale of the UV transformation so I can multiply this to make this a lot smaller there we go so we have a little bit of a better effect over here now what you can also do is you can change the UV ref from repeat to none so then if you go into your UV view over here you can see that it's not tiling horizontally and vertically it's only tiling once you can change this to horizontally vertically or to all over you can also change the rotation of this the offset and all those other fun things one of these transformations can also be applied inside the viewports over here I can move this over here can rotate it can scale it non-uniformly so that these values are not the same anymore and so on and then the last thing I want to talk about is the projection mode so for now you can see that this tileable material has been placed on our UV map uniformly so for example you can see that let's find a good spots over here you can sort of see that this tile blue material is exactly in line with each other and they all continue if there wasn't these gray areas over here it would just be the styler ball material but because of UV unwrapping you're going to have seams everywhere so for example on top of my back over here you can definitely see that noticeable seam so what you can do is change the projection mode from yulie projection to try planar projection and this uses this gizmo over here to route try and remove the seams so now you can see I have no seam over here I can move this gizmo around and you can see the changes in my UV Channel so you can see that it's trying to compensate for the different shapes of your mesh to try and get a uniform texture over all of it so that's the basics of try planar projection you can hit e over here to rotate it and then W to move it around and then I believe are to size it something like that so the two basic forms of projection are going to be UV and tri planar you can use planar by itself and spherical but you're not going to use those as often you can hide this gizmo by just clicking on this and then you can see the results of your tri planar projection so now we've talked about materials but let's talk about smart materials for a second so I'm going to delete this full layer and what you can do here is you can click here and let's add a smart material so substance has multiple different smart materials that you can use for your projects so if we go here and we click on what's this one creature skin alien blue creature skin green smooth that might work and there you can see that the smart material automatically applies its own distinct colors and maps to your model but the difference between a material and a smart material is that material only has base properties so let's add a full layer let's check let's click on a material quickly so let's go with I don't know iron and you have a few different options here well let's go with iron diamonds okay it looks good we can change this to try playing a projection if we want to so the difference between this and a smart material is that we only have these base properties which are useful but they're not always going to be very instant specific what I mean by that is they're not going to change they're not going to change the matter what mesh you are working on whereas the smart material you can already see it's taken some of our inputs in order to create colors and shapes that are more mesh specific you can see that the nose has been darkened and some of the areas over here around the face so what the smart material has done is it's just created layer stack so materials or smart materials are created by making multiple different layers with different inputs that affect the look of your mesh and then after they've been made they are just grouped in a folder like this very similar to photoshop once again so those are smart materials a very very brief introduction to them but now let's get into creating this dragon that we're going to end up with so I'm going to delete the smart material and let's get to work so we're going to be learning through examples you know so first thing you'd obviously want to do with your dragon is you'd want to have the base color for the skin so I don't want Heights and I don't want well I do want metal just so I can set it to zero so let's choose a color I'm thinking maybe maybe a beige and you can affect all of these colors using HSV values hue saturation and the V stands for it slipped my mind now I think it's value so you can just affect the vibrancy with this over here so effectively how light and dark it is so I think we're going to use something like this but of course this is much too shiny so we're going to increase the roughness now maybe I want a little bit of a preview of what my roughness is looking like so I'm gonna hit C and go to roughness and then you can see how the values change over here okay so that looks good for our base layer but now of course we're going to want to add more of them so I'm going to name this as base properties it's always a good idea to name all of your layers just so you know exactly what you're looking for it's a later stage now of course it's always a good idea to save your projects before anything goes wrong so I'm going to choose save and compact which just helps with the file size of this so I'll just call this elder dragon substance painter whatever you want to call it and that will save that so now we want to add on to this layer that we already have so I'm going to choose a full layer so now I'm gonna call this color variation but now if I were to change any of these properties so if no example I just want color and roughness and the reference will be a bit darker and the color will be something like that but now because the color variation is on top of the base properties it's going to be placed on top of that and then we can't see through to our beige sort of color so now this is where masks come in so we want this purple color to only affect certain areas so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to right click on our layer and say add black mask and now because this is a black mask it's saying okay don't use any of this layer anywhere so we need to add white values to our mask so that it can define where we want to use this layer and we're not so if I hold down alt and click on my mosque you can get a preview of the mosque over there so now you'll see I can paint on my mosque and then when I hit em again you can see that through my mask everything has been revealed and now why I chose to use the full layer as I mentioned earlier as I can now go in and very freely change all of these properties at any stage but you don't have to paint on your on your mess you can do various different things so for example we're going to add an effect over here so we're going to add a paint layer so then we can now paint on it as we will you could also if you wanted to you could select by polygons so there this just allows me to select by the face of the mesh this often doesn't provide the best result because you can see that because we're working only at 2k you get some roughness to the edge of that so I'm going to delete those and we're going to use a paint layer for now but you don't even have to use a paint layer you can delete it by clicking on that X over there and we're going to use a full so now at the moment the full is just a grayscale value between 0 & 1 but you can click on this here and choose a full so I think what I want to do is I'm going to use a clouds texture so let's use clouds 3 something like that and then you can change the different parameters of the clouds over here by affecting the balance and the contrast and things like that okay but now once again you can see that we're getting these ugly seams over here because of how my mesh is divided up you can see it on the horns over here so let's go to try playing a prediction that helps with those seams a little bit and let's change the tiling of this so that it's not so big something like that okay so now we have a bit of color variation of course this isn't going to be our final color but like I said we can change it at any time let's get something like this going something like that doesn't really matter for now for now we're just experimenting so we have this color variation over here but you'll notice that it's very prominent on the surface of the model so as you can see over here there's a little hundred and this is similar to the opacity slider inside Photoshop so I can turn this down or up as I want so for now let me just look at my base color base color looks something like this okay so if I affect this you can see that it goes from 100% opaque to zero and you can choose which one suits you best okay but now let's get into the more interesting stuff with masks so for now we have a full but let's add a another full layer and let's call this color variation too and let's just affect the color with this we don't want to affect anything else and I'm gonna make this white and I'll show you why now so what we can do is we can add a black mask like we did earlier and then we're going to add a full but now we're going to use the ambient occlusion map that we baked earlier so now if I hold alt and click you can see that my mask is just exactly the same as my ambient occlusion mask but we want to edit this to work in our favour so I can add something else to this layer stack by adding a levels so now if you don't know water levels is basically a lull allows you to alter the black and whites and gray values of any input map so if I go to just my mask view here if I so you can see on your levels you have black white and gray on the top and black and white on the bottom and this graph gives you a rough indication of how your values are spread so if I drag the middle gray value closer to there you can see that my gray values get closer to black if I if I do the opposite you can see the microwave value get closer to white and if I do this all my black values get more black all of my white values get more white and then the bottom here it's just a general multiplier I guess you could say of your levels so now I want color inside the crevices of my model so what I can do is I can invert this mask by just switching these two around and now you can see the white areas will be affected and the black areas not so you can see that I only have white where I have ambient occlusion so it just allows you to add something a little bit more so now I just want to edit this a little bit so I want very very subtle I can even do this if I want to something like that there we go so now you can see I only have white in the areas that are specified but you can definitely see the pixelation from those soft shadows so I just want to add a filter and this allows you to do a variety of different things which we'll cover throughout the duration of this video but for now I just want to use a blur which will just allow me to blur that a little bit I don't want this intense so I'm just going to change that to North Point too and now I will show you the reason why I wanted this to be white so now you can see that it says normal on top of all of my full layers over here so what we can do very similar to photoshop once again is you can change the blending mode to normal pass through disable or anything else that you can think of so now for example I want to use subtract so what that does is it will take all the values for all the moss below this and it will subtract the white color from them which means I will end up with a pure black value essentially we don't want to pure black value so I'm just going to take that down until it's just a nice brown or something like that and I think I want a little bit more of my ambient occlusion showing through so we're gonna use something like that okay so I will go back to my material view this is how it's looking at the moment you can also use the blend to say linear dodge add that'll make everything white because you're adding all of those values you can use multiply you can use pass through whatever you want but for now like I said we're going to be using subtract okay so now that this stage I like to get the rough materials masked out inside my viewport so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add it's say three new full layers and I'm gonna call this horns I'm gonna call this teeth and I'm gonna call this eyes so for the teeth that's pretty easy we're going to add a black mask and then we want to paint in that black mask so I'm going to go f1 and I know in my UV is all of my teeth over here so I'm just gonna use the polyfill make my life a little bit easier you switch to paint if that's a little bit easier you also something to note with the polyfill tool is that if I were to go over here you can see that we have different options over here you can use the full mode which can use triangles this is a quad mesh so we don't have well we shouldn't have any triangles but I'm sure I do somewhere either you can full quads you can full I think it's the entire mesh and you can also fill a UV chunk so for example I can you feel just that one if I want to or just that one okay now you'll see that I have some faces over here that I'm pretty sure I didn't select and the reason for this is because of the brush mode that I'm using so let's go to black which is of course is the full over here and let's paint you know I just want to use black everywhere so that nothing is selected so now let me show you what I mean by this so I'm going to switch back to white you can press s X on your keyboard to switch between black and white going to be using that one a lot so now I'm just painting on my teeth but you can see that other areas of the mesh are affected this is because if you right-click and go to your brush I'm using the alignment using tangent wrap so what this does is let's go to my material here say if I paint on both the bottom and top lips at once like this if you now go to your mask view so let's see where that is it's paint you can see that it's affecting over here and over here at once that's because we're painting on the 3d model what we can do is we can change this alignment to UV so now if I paint on this it's only going to paint on the UV map that I'm currently on unless I specifically pass all the way over into the other seam so now if I paint on this it's not going to affect anything else except that UV so long as I keep my mouse within the bounds of the UV shell so that's just a little bit of background info on that if you're wondering why you have some of your mosque there painting over other things so I want to let's just delete all of this let's make sure in our paint layer okay so I want to select with this but let's make sure that we're in the very near V mode you okay so now we have all of our teeth selected go back into paint mode so now let's hide the eyes for now and let's hide the horns so now you can see we just have our teeth selected so we can go ahead and sit some some roughness and color values so we can go check out our roughness here I think this is fine let's change this to but more of a yellow tinge maybe there we go okay so we're shaping up let's go do the eyes quickly at a black mask as always and you don't even actually have to add a paint layer if we just want to polyfill so let's just do that I know my UV chunk is here so there we go is now I want to make a little bit of an evil looking dragon so we're going to go into the base color don't want those we want this to be perfectly smooth because there I is and let's bring this down to a darker value there we go we can worry about the pupils and stuff at a later stage so now I need to mask out these horns so let's bring these back in add a black mask as we do but now I can't really polyfill these horns because the way I've unwrapped them they don't always align with the normals and in some of these smaller horns they just don't line up very well so if I would try to polyfill them like this I still let my UV chunk selected so I don't want that so let's go here let's try to do something less like that so if I try to create a mosque for my horns like this it wouldn't look very good because just cuz of how are the Polly's are placed so in this case this is one of those times we actually have to go in and hand paint all of these different horns this is why in ZBrush you'd want to actually have your you want to have your poly group set up properly so that you can have different materials for your horns and your skin and your eyes and everything else so that you don't have to do this so it for now what we need to do is I'm going to create a paint layer and make sure I'm on white and then let's go into this mode and then you can also zoom in with alt and the right mouse and I'm just going to change the side and what I'd have to do is or what I did do is I had to manually paint out these horns but for the purposes of this video we don't want to do that because it does take a very long time so what I'm going to do is I'm going to import a custom mask for myself to use I'm going to go file import resources add resources and I'm going to import this mask that I've made called a horns mask so now you can see that you can put in an optional prefix or path for this I don't want to do that and I want to use this as a texture so I'm going to click that now I can import this to either the session which means that it will remove this file as soon as I close this version of substance painter or I can add it to the project which means it will always be available to project this is what I want to do so I'm going to hit import so now instead of using paint let's use a full layer so I'm going to go in here and search for horns and the score mask so if I click this you can now see that all of my horns are nicely masked out so let's go ahead and choose some properties for this I think they should match the teeth but maybe a little bit darker maybe a little bit of a brown color okay and then we want them to be quite rough but not as rough as the skin something like that maybe now we can go ahead and we can just move our camera around get an idea of how the light is interacting with our model and it's looking quite good so and we create some real variation with the material who those teeth are looking much too bright so I'm gonna bring this down and bring the saturation down as well it looks a little bit better so now we need to really push the diffuse or the base color on this so that we start to get a more realistic result so for now we have our color variation too which adds some darkening over here but I don't think it's enough so I'm gonna go back and now you can just change this a little bit just to get a better result now for example I might decide I don't like the look of this red splotchy look so I can always go back into my color variation and change whatever grunge I want to use so maybe not clouds three maybe clouds - okay so I can bump up the contrast here remember - right balance a but less perhaps okay something like that I think there's a standing it bits much on the skin maybe I want to make this a bit dark like I said that's the really really powerful thing about substance design is that you can really tweak this as you will at any stage of the project let me just go ahead and save before I forget and let's continue so now in the original project that I did which was shown at the beginning of this video I had a little bit of color variation down on the throat so now let's get into some of the advanced masking that we can do so I want to go this go on top of all of my color variation but below the horns so I'm going to make a new layer over there and we'll call this neck color oops okay so let's create some masks as we always do so now I'm going to paint in what I want over here and I'm going to do this and I don't want this to affect anything so I'm just going to paint you know over here and of course we have our brush set to UV I don't want that I want it back to tangent plane so we get something like that you so this is what our base color is looking like at the moment you okay so now even when we go in and we change the neck color to match what who wants I think this should be a little bit rougher or maybe actually less rough how's our roughness looking yeah okay let's make this a little bit less rough so we can have some now it's very obvious that I've just painted this on the fall-off from the brush helps a little bit but it's not going to do all of our work for us so now the nice thing about the mask is that they also have blend modes so now for example we have this paint so now if I were to add a fill it would automatically fill the entire mask but if I were to set that to multiply let's show you the difference so this is our paint by itself now this is our full set to multiply because the full is currently just a uniform color of no point five it's going to multiply by noir point five but now if we use a grunge map so let's search for grunge and let's look for something that might approximate skin maybe this one so now it gives you some much-needed variation in your color and in your roughness on the neck over here so we can as always change these parameters contrast and the tiling so I think - it's probably a good value and then of course let's change the color over here you look at our defuse this is obviously standing out a little bit so we can change the blend mode down okay not really liking that grunge it's not looking natural enough groans dirt maybe that does look better I think that's good five oh yeah I think that looks a little bit better now we want to create some more color variations let's do this over here so let's call this color lighter add a black mask and it's important to keep in mind that you don't just have to blend your base color so for example let me show you what I mean by this let's go to add a paint layer I just want to add so I'm stripes up and down the side over here maybe on the back a little bit so it's really nice to just mask out the rough areas that you want to use for your mas because when you multiply your masks you're not going to see these are for sketch arts here so what I can do is same as last time I can add a full set to multiply and let's search for spots maybe there we go to scale up a little bit there we go and then we can change the hardness shape and let's change this to UV around maybe let's change this to UV projection it makes it just a little bit less obvious that it's tiling okay so we can change the base color to maybe a lichen maybe an orange of something like that you because the roughness is so different over here it's going to show quite a lot so let me just look in this view there we go something like that so now what I was saying about the blatant modes it doesn't only have to be for the base color can be for the roughness as well you can see now we've got some reflections going on here because the roughness is so low so I'd like my roughness to be a little bit rougher than the rest so it doesn't cost as many reflections but I don't have to go in here and set this as higher than the rest let me show you what I mean when our working in the base color tab but we can switch its roughness and now of course all of our references are set to normal but this one we can set to add so now if I go back to base color and go to my roughness so now it's going to add not 0.57 to the current values if I go to this I'm in the wrong review sorry this one it's going to add nor point eight or my values here it's going to add zero so if you just want to add a little bit of roughness you just have to add a little bit of reference there okay so what else can we do to make this a little bit more appealing let's work with height a little bit so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to copy my horns so I can right click and say duplicate layer now I want to get some height in on these horns because they're looking quite smooth so what I'm going to do is I'm going to multiply a full multiply and now we just need to look for a grunge that looks kind of like horns I suppose not really horns I just want to get some nice lines in there so I cannot see what this looks like okay maybe just can you change the scale okay that actually looks quite good so now I want this to affect the height and the color so not the roughness so let's change to a bit of a darker color there we go we're gonna need to get some variation in those horns and now I want to affect the normal map so the way we do this is by using the height channel over here we can use the normal that's more for placing decals on the surface of the mesh so what I mean by this is if we go over here to our you can see this is our normal map this is our normal plus height plus mesh so this takes into account whatever we change on the normal map on the height map and on our baked mesh map so that's why we're going to be working on the height Channel now I want these grooves in this mask I want them to recess into the horn a little bit so all I need to do is I need to go in here and I need to change the height I of course only want this to happen the tiniest amount so let's go negative no point north - now if we go to our hide plus mesh you can see that the changes are reflected here so it depends if you want a more powerful normal map or not I don't think it works really well so let's go and ignore my not for maybe you so you can just really play around with these and see how it feels okay so we've definitely got a lot further than well we've come a long way since we started so let's go ahead and start making this look a little bit more belief believable so I want to add some darkness to the horns so let's go add a new layer say head darkness your names don't have to make sense to anyone except you I suppose so let's go in and paint so I just want to do this and this might be a prime usage example for using the UV alignment because now I can just paint on that UV without having any risk of painting on anything else so as long as you make sure to keep your mouse over the horn or your tablets or whatever you may be using you're not gonna have any risk of overlapping on to other things you so from here on our to basically just becomes a process of adding more layers adding more masks and altering your mask in different ways so as to create a visually appealing and cohesive image so I want to let me rethink my color palette a little bit yes it's like this red obviously much too vibrance over here and now the beauty of substance painter is now I've decided I don't want to brown drag anymore I went to green dragon so I'm going to go back down here and change the color to a nice green maybe a nice dark green obviously in the saturation down a lot the vibrancy down a lot and I want to change that color variation to orange you okay so then let's change what was it was this one let's change that to a dark green the blue is also looking kind of nice but I think let's stick to a darker green and there we go I just want to decrease the saturation on this because if you look at your base color you can have a general idea of how things should look and you don't things to saturate you you okay so let's go back to this head darkness so first of all what we can do is we can bring the saturation down we can change the blending down a little bit actually I want this to be red as well so you can really see what I mean by changing on the fly I don't really like that pattern so I might have to go in and change it to nose so you can see even the bottom is looking a little bit better than it did before with the other color okay I just want a little bit more contrast between these two so I'm gonna there we go so now we've added a lot of darkening colors let's add a little bit of lightness so I want this to go over here so I'll just call this Epling add a black mask and now what I want to use is the curvature mask because the curvature mask gives you a really cool way of controlling the highs and the lows of your mask so the curvature by itself so you can see wherever there's something that's been really like raised and beveled and curved it's going to be white so you can really use this to take advantage of the high points of your mesh so of course I'm going to add a levels like I did last time and now you can do something like this so now I just want these to be needs to be white and then I'm going to add a blur like I did the previous time because when using your mesh maps things get tend to get a little bit pixelated quite quickly something like that okay so I want to set this to it's good to add bring this all the way down you're going to get a very subtle color variation there and I quite like it you can also change these values by typing them in so I think something like that looks quite good okay so my horns darkness I want to add a full layer set to multiply and I want to give us a grunge as well so that's gonna grunge choose a random one nope that sort of looks natural maybe that one so it's just a case of really going through playing with all of these and making them work for you okay let's change this pattern to something else so because I already have my paint layer set up I don't even need to change that I just need to change the grunge that I'm using try something like that okay maybe we can add a little bit of height to these there we go okay obviously not quite so much you you you you now if you change the balance it'll affect where you have so if you'd set the balance all its one you can see the stripes that I painted with my paint so it's really affecting the multiply here so now I can go back with our paint changes to arrays and now I can set this back on mask some of these out maybe a little bit small okay we don't want that on actually this might be a good opportunity okay something else I'm just going to undo everything I've done there we can add another full layer over here and set this one to subtract so let's get another gram screen maybe this one so now with the subtract it's now subtracting this grunge from everything else so if I take this we can change the scale so it really does provide you with a lot of power to what you're wanting to do I think adding height to this might be the one reason why I'm not liking it and it's a little bit obvious okay you now we can go in paint some more in if we want to and the nice thing is because we put our horns on top of this it's never going to show up on top of our horns you you okay so what can we do next so far it's looking quite good I want to add some veins to that neck color so veins and let's find something that looks kind of like veins I'm pretty sure there's a grunge that could work well for this marble veins okay this kind of works but not really so what I'm gonna do is change the scale and now of course we don't want this everywhere so I'm going to mask this out so let's say we want to bait my own UV paint I am let's go to touch a plane maybe the skin over here is a little bit more a little bit more shiny a little bit more translucent so we can add some veins over here okay and maybe I want to change this to a tri planar projection but now you're definitely noticed that these are very straight they don't really look like vanes at all so what I can do is I can add a filter and that filter is going to be a WAP so what the walk does it just takes a Perlin noise and it walks it so something like that gets my mask a little bit more so this is without the warp and this is with so it does make it look a little bit more like lanes but maybe the warp is a little bit intense so that's like this I want this to be a little bit smaller you so let's go through here and take some out just to get a little bit more randomness and variation in okay of course we want these to be the appropriate color so let's look for a nice blue there we go always make sure to refer back to your base color whenever possible this is obviously way too saturated and not dark enough think here's a prime use case to add some height let's decide very little there and actually on our neck maybe as well let's add some height just get feeling a rougher skin there we go that looks a little bit better yes I think it definitely does okay at the grand scheme of things maybe that's a little bit high so let's bring it down a little bit okay here's how everything is looking on our normal map you go back to those veins how are they looking a little bit bright so let's bring this up here okay so I think we've gone through most of what I wanted to cover this is basically just showing you how you can really really apply substance painter in any way that you want so now I think before we end this let's go through and do a little bit of hand painting of the scales and then we'll do the eye color and then I think we should be more or less done with this for now and of course you can change this as much as you want you can edit this as much as you want there's really no limit to what you can imagine with this so let's make a few final tweaks but I think our little dragon over here is looking quite good I want to change this grunge because I'm not really feeling it I want something a little bit more a little bit more streaky something like this that looks good I think so that's good balance contrast so like that okay what else did I want to do I wanted to do some scales scales obviously have to go on top of everything so I want the scales just to be a little bit shinier so I'm just gonna actually have to hand paint them so let's not affect the color I just want to fit the roughness of these so roughness so maybe something like that is a little bit too rough so let's go so we're like that yeah it's just a raise all of that that I did there yes now I'll get the tablet out this text is looking a little bit low res we might actually just once up this to four K at the earliest opportunity but all I'm doing now is I'm just going to go ahead and add some roughness variation to these scales because all in all our dragon is rather rough he's not reflecting too much so this might just make him a little bit more interesting so you'll notice might be a little bit difficult to picture that this roughness is changing so let's give it a color visualizer just so I can more clearly see what I'm painting so you can see I missed out a few spots yeah so let's go over them you you you you okay I think you get the idea basically you can create as much roughness variation as you want and that just gives you something a little bit cooler to look at okay what is one of the last things that I want to do let's look at those lighter colors looking a little bit a little bit strong you kind of like that you can get some sort of let's make this a little bit more green bring down that saturation let's look for dots spots you you there we go it's just something to look at basically by moving these up and down in your layer stack you can see what is affected maybe that's that's big ok so I'm going to do the eyes and then I think we're going to be done so for the eyes I'm just going to use a paint layer because why not not it's our last stage we might as well keep things simple at this time make sure I'm on tangent wrap and I don't want this okay so what you can do is one last little tip is you can activate symmetry so if I press this button over here you can see this red line gets drawn down the middle of my model and then symmetry is activated so now whatever I do on either side I should probably give this brush let's paint layer some properties so let's go ahead and do that why is it knocking me because we're on a racer of course okay so I just want color for the eyes let me just demonstrate demonstrate the symmetry so whatever I do over here is done over there as well now this model is not perfectly symmetrical so the model itself not the method that I'm using so I don't think I can use this method to do the eyes let's try it anyway oh yes you can see it's a little bit off-center so I'm not going to do that so you can turn symmetry off and I want to change this too you but are the light gold and I went soon the hardness up you you okay so because I wasn't working on UV mode there you can see some of that color spilled out over so what I want to do is I'm just want to go erase that so I just never find where would that color be there we go you you are we not on UV sorry we're on tangent I want to be on UV and where's this one this one's kind of small I can just do that by hand no one's gonna notice okay now because we're on paint moon we can just go and change things up straight away let's go down to black then we can just hand paint this in basically you okay so there we have him our dragon more or less done so now straight away at the end of the salt process you can see if there are things that you'd like to change if there's nothing that you'd like to change then you can just go ahead and export everything but the first thing I notice is these horns the height is obviously a little bit rough on them so let's go any good Norton to five that looks better the horns darkness I think it looked better when it was just a bit of a gradient so I'm gonna delete that the everything else looks pretty good you might want to go in and just change the colors if you want to you can change the patterns that you want to use anything that you wants you can really be changed at any time so for example just for lip looked if purposes you might want to decide your dragons a little bit more friendly you can straight away go change that white that eye color to white straight away looks a little bit less menacing I hope you can always go into your paint layer and give him some nice circular pupils whatever you want to change for now though I think this is the end of this beginner's guide to substance paint so thank you very much for watching I hope that you found it to be quite concise and walking through exactly what you needed to know inside substance painter and I hope that it serves you well in everything that you attempt to do in the software it's a really great software I really encourage you to get your hands on it and to get familiar with it thank you very much for watching and have a good one

Channel: Cairo Goodbrand

Views: 1,294

Rating: 4.9200001 out of 5

Keywords: substance, substance painter, 3d, zbrush, tutorial, beginner, learning, substance3d, unreal engine, game art, video games

Id: FnPG77DfVI8

Length: 77min 7sec (4627 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020