Welcome to this multi-part tutorial Series where we are going to go over various ways on how to use anchor points inside of substance 3D painter. We are going to start our first video off by creating this double painted layer effects that you can see over here. These anchor points are very nice because they are completely Dynamic. Meaning that what we can do is with this. Single slider or our edge wear we can just completely control both of our paint layers and create this interesting effect. So what are anchor points? Anchor points are a powerful feature that lets you reuse a part of your layer stack. This means that you can define a mask or layer once and the headphones it dynamically in other layers. If you change, the Anchor Point, all references are updated as well. Letting you work smarter and faster. Okay. So, let's Dive Right In. So here we have our bare material, which is just a simple bronze material. Now. What were first going to do is we first need to create our paint for this. We are going to use a simple fill layer. We can go up here to the little Paint Bucket, and create a fill layer, and let's call this white underscore paint by double clicking on the name. Now, you can, of course, go ahead and you can mess around a little bit with the settings. Let's say that we, for example, give it a little bit more roughness to make. It a little bit shinier, but that's about it. What I'm going to do for now. You can also go ahead and maybe like here on the base called. Let's make like a little bit darker. Now that you have this one, remember that we are going to have two layers of paint, so we can right away also right, click on it and duplicate and just call this blue underscore paint. And for this blue paint, you can just go into your base color. And then if we just change the slider with the H on it, then we can go. Had to me. Can give it like a nice darkish, blue paint. Look, something like this. For example. Now, at this point, we are first going to turn off our blue paint and we are going to focus first on our white paint over here. Now with our white paints. What we first want to do is we want to give it some damage so that we can see the bronze material below it. We are going to go up here to the second button and we are going to add a mask and you want to add a black mask over here. Now that Just remove our fill layer because of course, black means that nothing is in here. Now, what we can do, very simple, we can right click and add the generator or you can, of course, go up here to the top and arts generator here. But in any case, when you have your generator, all you need to do is, you can go over here to your generator. And then there are a few different generators that we can use. You can, for example, create like a dirt effect, a rust dripping effect. But the one that we want to do is we want to go ahead and we want to Web a metal Edge, where effects over here, you click on it and then you get a bunch of these sliders with different settings. Now, we won't go into this too much because this is a Anchor Point tutorial. But all I want to do is I want to press the invert button so that most of our model is paint and then it will just kind like take away some of these scratches. And then we can use our we're level to basically increase or decrease these scratches. We can also play how to do contrast if you Example want to make them softer or sharper. So let's go ahead and set it to roughly around this amount. That should be fine. And now all that we need to do is we need to go out of in to start our anchor points, so that we can reference this mask into our blue paint and then make changes to it. This is super simple. All you need to do is go up here to your little magic wand tool and then you just want to go ahead and add an anchor points or once again, you get always just right click and find the same settings. Now, you can give the Anchor Point and name but because the Anchor Point always uses the name of your parents. Or over here. It's already called white paint mask, which is clear enough for me. Now. The next step that we want to do is we want to go ahead and we want to activate our blue layer and we want to go a reference, the Anchor Point from our white paint layer. We do this by once again, adding a simple black mask to our blue paint and the way that you need to reference an anchor point, is it needs to be a reference towards, for example, a fill layer something where you can input a specific mask. So we always use a filly of for this. You can right click and you can go ahead and you can add a fill layer down here. And this is what I mean with that is can input a mask you often. See this also in like your base layers that you can input different masks. So with our blue paint enough, fill layer, we simply want to click on the gray scale mask and then you can see a second tab called anchor points. When you click on this tab, you can see that it will have all of the anchor points in your scene. Which right now is use this one. We can click on it. And now, what you can see happening is that now this mask is pretty much the same as this mask because it's it's referencing it. So at this point we do get a levels that we can play with along with the anchor points. So if you, for example, would change these levels, you can see that. Now, you can give it almost like a little outline on top of our paint to give it the effect that we have both are white paint and then we Blue paint that is sitting white on top. That's always quite nice that we can use this effect, or you can of course, invert your mask. If you want to do something interesting like that. So what we can do is let's say that we set our middle slider, a little bit higher, just show up a little bit of like this, white paint, still below a blue paint and at this, how we can reference our anchor points. So this is very basic if you want to give it a little bit extra, what you can do is now you can start to for example. I fade away the paint using an extra generator. Now. This is just a bonus. It has nothing to do with anchor points, but I'm an artist and I do like to make things look extra cool. So, what I can do is I can go up here to my smart masks. And then if I scroll down, I can grab, for example, a surface worn mask. I can actually just drag this right on top of my anchor points. And the only thing I need to do now is I just need to go down here into my blending mode and set it to multiply because Now, it is over. Whiting are fill layer. But if you set it to multiply, it will combine with the fill layer. So once we've done that, we can click on our masks, for example, and then we can go ahead, and we can play a little bit more with over here, the paint. And you can see that we can almost like fade away our blue paint. So that was a very basic overview on how to create an anchor point. And then also, how to reference this Anchor Point in a second layer and then just builds upon it. Now, we are nearing the end of our first video. One thing, you always need to keep in mind, and I set this already in the beginning of the video is that the anchor points can only reference something at the top? You cannot go the other way around. So if I would, for example, grab my blue paint and move it down, here it is not able to reference my Anchor Point. You can see that. Now the link is broken and this is simply because your anchor points. It's almost like codes its reach from the top to bottom. Although in this specific case. Way that it reaches from the bottom to the top, because that's how it works inside of substance painter. So, the last thing I want to show you is, I want to show you that these anchor points are truly Dynamic. Let's go ahead and let's go back to our white paint. And what we can do is we can go up here and we can add another paint layer of paint layer is just an extra layer that allows you to paint in on your actual model. Using, for example brushes. Now, what we want to do is we want to go ahead and we want to move this painting. Layer below our anchor points. Because else The Anchor Point does not see it in this paint layer. If I would. Now, for example, go ahead and go to my brushes and let's just grab like a cool brush like the charcoal full frame. For example, set my sights a bit lower. I can show you that. Now, if I can paint in here oppress X, if you want to flip the color around, you can see that now I can actually just go ahead and I can simply paint in and then you can see that the paint it will be rough. Reference in our Anchor Point and our blue paint just nicely also abides by all the rules that we have set up, just like that. And of course, on top of this, you can always go back into your generator and you can increase or decrease this. So it is truly Dynamic and it is so easy. Once you've set this up, also with more advanced setups to really get like interesting effects that will save you a lot of time and effort.
