Anchor Points in Substance Painter

guys welcome back to my channel those of you returning thank you very much for those of you who are new my name's Andrew and I'm lead look development artist rising sun pitches and i also run this channel aj 3d VFX today's topic is going to be anchor points they are super super powerful one of my favorite features of substance painter so we'll cover yeah what is an anchor point how do we use them daily and at the end i'll show you a couple of like abstract tricks that you can do with them and a few things that are yeah we just stumbled across that are really really cool so i'm yeah and what better way to demonstrate that then on this model of an anchor yeah my dad jokes it's starting to kick in now so before we dive into this and I've got a material kind of set up with the whole bunch of anchor points we'll we'll start simple so we'll just jump over to the tiling sample scene and just show you the absolute basics so what is an anchor point an anchor point basically is a way to reference a single layers information higher up in the layer stack and this is super useful and super powerful for all sorts of reasons but just straight up let's just start by making an anchor point and referencing it into a new layer so I've got a just a flat fill layer here and an empty paint layer just going to paint something on our tiling material and I'm going to create an anchor point for this layer so the way we do this is we right click on the layer that we want and the very bottom is add anchor point so we're going to create that and you can see what it's done you've got this little icon with an anchor here and it's copied the layer name and already named that as is our anchor point but you could rename this to something more specific if you wanted to now or later on so so that's the anchor point created this references section here will tell you later on once we've linked it up to another layer what layers it's linked to so say if you use this layer to link against ten other layers there should be ten listings here to tell you actually what it's doing so so that's the basic step one so step two let's let's read this anchor point just back into another layer so I'm going to create a new fill layer I'm just going to turn all of this stuff off and in the base color let's just say I want this anchor point to fill the base color so we can select this and over here there's this tab called anchor points and you'll see now that this anchor point is showing up and you'll even see here on the side when I hover my mouse over it it's actually highlighting the layer that the anchors located and that's super useful especially when you've got a complex layer stack like will see later on so I'll select this and that's basically essentially like copied the layer that we have underneath I once I copied the layer you can kind of see it's giving us a couple of options for like the channel that we want to reference so we could reference just say like the height roughness Metallica like a individual channel gives us control over the Alpha how we want to handle the Alpha as it's referenced back up into this new layer and also give us some levels controls directly on the the link so we can we can remap this quickly without having to drop in other levels no down or something like that so so that basically is yet that's the very basics of creating a simple Anchor Point now let's jump in back to the anchor model and I'll show you how I use it through basically masking is kind of the primary use that you'll you'll use this for most of the time like nine times out of ten it'll be for some sort of masking but you can do other cool stuff with it which will will jump into at the end alrighty so now that we're back on to anchor model I'll walk you through the layer stack that I have here step-by-step so you can see how I'm using anchor points and I've tried to all of this stuff you probably could do different ways I've just hand up using anchors as much as possible just to help you guys out try and get to grips with how to use them and demo them so the first thing I've done is applied a flat material just with some height detail so you'll see this is 4k single tile as well so just give it a second you can see the first layer is just real basic stuff the the model is quite simple I modeled it in like an hour or two so the model is really simple there's no sculpt no nothing so I've added this just to top up some of the very base detail and we're going to use this later on to tie into with the actual paint and masking and that sort of thing so so that's the first step I have a logo here as well which I will cover just after this first step so I've got this steel painted material I'll enable and you can see here that's pretty pretty standard I've just used one of the factory smart materials but I've got some some masking happening here to kind of desaturate this lower area and I've anchored that later on but let's let's just go from the very start so I've got all this off so base basic paint layer very basic liar we have some inclusion based dirt using the mass builder now some edge scratches and then finally this is the color correct desaturate and kind of make this lower area green yeah it's probably in the water it's like that bit would start to wear first I would imagine I haven't really thought too much about real anchors so so that's all pretty standard stuff now where this starts to get interesting for example is let's say I have a logo that I want to put on there so turn this long you can see I've got this logo here Andy's anchor company so the way that I've got this set up at the moment is that let's turn this off turn this off and turn on the original artwork actually on the other side oh say it's the the artwork the logo with some IDs separated out so I've got the text in red and the ring in green no alpha no nothing it doesn't have to be too fancy actually prefer working with logos and stuff this way now what I've done is I've got two I need two sides obviously so the logo can be on both sides and the way I've done this is this is just a flat layer with the artwork inserted just in the color and then just like we did before I've made a new field layer and I set an anchor point on here and referencing it back up on another channel just using the base color and really I'm doing that so that I can get the logo on both sides but turn this off you can see so the one on this side is being referenced from the original and there's a reason why I've done done it this way and I'll show you why so we jump over to our UV view so here's the UVs we'll just jump into the color view and we can see now so the way I've placed the logo is using the transform tools just like a 2d transforming here but I move this now these both move together so let's say I wanted the logo down the bottom only have to move it once instead of twice I don't have to worry about lineup issues and things like that so we jump back to the 3d view so you can see that both moved together a little bit offset anyway because my TVs are a bit off but um yeah you get the idea so that's that's like a super useful thing and something quite simple but it's already really wicked using anchors so we'll put this back now the next step is I want to actually run this as height because a lot of these anchors you know it's like an iron pressed sort of logo that's in there it's so now we need to use the artwork to create that effect so I can now turn these off and we'll go through to these two layers that I'm using to create that the first layer contains the text go so you can see that's now now embossed and I've got a bit of sort of scratching out of it and things like that and it's obviously appearing on on both sides so I'll go through the layer stack and how I'm doing this so this is a fill layer with the height set and nothing else got blank id channel there as well in case I need it later and in the mask I'm using a fill the same way similar to how we do in the colour channels and then I'm referencing back here and you can see when I hover my mouse over it it tells me which layer it's pulling on and then I'm selecting the channel I want to use so in this case my colour is white sorry my own decal map essentially is plugged into color and I'm referencing the base colour and what I'm doing here as well you can see this is kind of drop down so the way I'm getting just the red channel because I've got the text and the ring is two separate layers because I want different control over them I'm going in here selecting red yeah I'm that all the way down oh sorry I was on the wrong layer apologies on the red Channel that's all the way up and on the green Channel is all the way down so that basically it just kills the green channel so that I get a mass that looks like this one problem with doing this though which is kind of it's kind of annoying you have to actually correct the value if you do it this way because the overall luminance drops it doesn't treat it like just a unique channel but it's not that much of a problem you just out of levels after it and that's sort of you can just boost the level back up it's fine so I've got too few layers for the logo and the logo copy and if I hover my mouse over here you can see it's referencing against the the other side so that's that's how I'm able to combine those two sides back into one channel now I'm taking that and I'm blurring it ever so slightly no I'm not blowing it at all it's it doesn't need it's another fill layer to add some scratching and to it you like cool just to kind of chew it out so that it's not like perfect yep cool so yeah it's pretty easy that's a really useful trick I use that like quite a bit so the exact same thing I've done here but for the ring you can see here but in this case I'm actually doing some extra stuff to it I'm blurring it to soften the ring out because it was just basically a sharp ring turned off you can see what it's doing and then same deal applying just some it's molting over a dirt map just to get a bit of true from it so so that basic workflow in itself sort of shows how powerful anchors are because you can you can just reach back deeper into the the layer stack grab something pull it up and do more things to it without affecting what's happening down here now obviously I could put these layers down into the the base layer as well and that would go all the way up then you'd lose sort of levels of control but it totally doesn't matter there's not like a right or wrong way or anything it's whatever the requirement is so that's sort of the first part and that's going to set up what we're going to talk about later so that's that's a really simple thing we can do now I'll skip this and we'll come back to that in just a second so going to turn the paint back on Oh so let's turn the logo back on and you'll see that in this smart material there's some edge work that's happening in this edges filter and I've actually got the logo showing through the mask it's reading it as if it was like baked into the geometry and the way we can achieve that once again is through anchor points and this this ties into the mask editors micro details map so what I'm doing here and this is where the pass-through layer comes in and I do this quite a lot where I want to flatten all the height into a single channel and the way I do that is by selecting e-buy it then on this flat layer I just disable all the channels and I set it to pass through and what that essentially does is it takes anything underneath all the height data and flattens it down into one layer so in Mari you can think of this like combined and flat except in substance painter it's non-destructive so it's yeah it's wicked bassist all the time you can see this layers disabled because it doesn't need to be enabled for us to still be able to read up the layer stack so so let's go through one now this edge where you can see down the bottom here I've got under image inputs there's this micro normal I'll just remove this for a sec see and see the effect Oh so there's micro normal and micro height and then we have micro details here so by default this is actually turned off and these are left blank as is so if you wanted to include your and you can see what's happening now this is this is what would happen if you didn't use this technique is you would have this embossed detail but it's not responding to the smart material it doesn't realize that there's kind of extrusion detail here and we want this to be treated as if it was geometry so the way we can do this is we create the pass through drop an anchor on it and under micro height we're going to select right us through and then by default it's going to be set to base color so we want to change that because we're looking at height information so I'm going to change its to height but all right and then lastly we're going to come up to the micro details tab and under micro height we're going to turn this on and now you can see the edges and stuff are all picking up now as if that was geometry so yeah that's a that's a super useful thing in itself just to be able to do that and obviously say I didn't want the ring to be included and only the text you could reposition where your anchor was and it can look specifically either at the text or the ring so really really really really useful so that's cool and this just shows something as well like if you were to say do this same thing in Mari so this mass that we have here now because I've got everything set up as an anchor I can let's say I got feedback from CG soup and it's like oh the logos in the wrong spot it needs to be down the bottom at the like the bell shape here so that's not problem with very quickly we can come back to here we can grab the logo and we can just move it down you'll see this might be a little bit slow yeah and see what's happening but basically it's all live and it's non-destructive and it's just automatically keeping the detail flowing through so now I'm yeah one thing to note as you can see from what's happening is that when you work with anchors the more anchors you add up the stack the slower things get so generally I will try and leave these finer detail techniques to last for the purposes of this video it's totally fine so yeah so now you can see this has been put down the bottom all the embossed details there the other side even though it's offset has come along for the ride and it's really really quick the big thing here is speed that we were able to make that change so yeah so that's cool all right cool so we've reset the logo and we can see that the metal material is is talking to our decal here so the next thing I've done is added some Ross because we want this to look like an old rusty used anchor so hey I've got some rust so now this is starting to look pretty cool now there's a couple of things happening in here that sort of make this pop the way it does so once again using anchors in certain ways I'm actually able to tie in the detail more specifically to what's happening so it's it's the same technique as using micro detail you can see like around all the text it's actually like reading that and putting the rust around there and it's following the ring around here as well as doing its own thing as it normally would from the data maps that you generate at bake time so we can see once again using this dirt channel I've selected height and then under micro details I have micro height turned on so just to demonstrate how this would look with out this input that's what you would get so you can see normally like you'd have to kind of maybe hand paint the rust or the mask back in so that's at around here but this way it is fully automatic and you don't have to worry about that so once again speed anchors really aid in the creation of masks and things like that and definitely with speed it's it's really quick so so yeah so that's cool so we can see that that's all talking to all the height detail underneath which is great it's all the lumps that we put in initially I'll just turn these two layers off and go back you can see this undulation that I put in to top up the lack of like model detail or sculpt detail in this case that's yeah perfectly smooth by turning that back on back on another on oh you can see like how much detail we've been able to add just texturally and being sort of clever in the way that we layer things up and having different material properties talk to each other I finally that's that's what really sets a substance painter apart is the fact that it's so easy to get masks to talk to each other and you see all these little indents have like little bits of rust just naturally occurring in them and like that's that's just wicked in terms of speed and quality like yeah that's a really weak amount of detail so the last thing we'll do is the same deal we'll put some dirt on top and you can see basically there's all this sort of pitting detail and once again that is all driven from grabbing all the high information underneath burning it down adding an anchor point and then referencing it back selecting the higher channel going into micro details and turning this on so I'll demonstrate so you can see with it turned off we're not we're only getting large frequency detail sort of you know what you typically get and then when we turn it back on you can see all this tiny detail from all the pitting and all the masker queue all the material accumulation just it just adds a whole nother level of detail really quickly so yeah that's really weird and then this last layer yes so this last layer is just like water you can see yes if we've been in the water or something and just basically got mass like this now another interesting sort of technique is where I did the discoloration in the paint I'm referencing back that mask which looks like this at this point here back into a feel at the very top to control a secondary effect and that is also super useful so I can actually link up where the discoloration of where this would sit probably the deepest in the water or maybe in the sand or something and that starts to erode the paint I can drive secondary effects off that same mass so if I was to adjust this mask now to to come up further so let's just do that we can maybe we'll just contrast it up you'll see it sharper across here yep now the water comes along for the ride so that's yeah it's really really weird you can see like now that's that's gotten much sharper so yeah this combination of micro detail and sharing maths and stuff is just like invaluable so yeah and we can see here's a render of the anchor using anchor points in IRA just to show all the sort of fine detail that we can achieve using using anchor points in this technique and so yeah all the detail around the the lettering we've got accumulation and then a wider spread of rust the Ross is actually talking to here as if it was geometry which is great and here we can see the mass that's driving the desaturation is also driving the wetness mask so that they talk to each other so that's really cool and we can and this micro-pitting that we added as well that's all showing up nicely so yeah cool so that's kind of anchors in a nutshell now let's cover some more abstract uses for them because what you can see how powerful they are working with masks there's also a lot of other kind of trippy things you can do with them so let's jump over to the tile sampling material and I'll show you some cool tricks okay trick number one is called paint offset this is really interesting because this was actually a question that had come up from one of our artists and she was wondering if it was possible to paint a stroke and then later offset it and it got us thinking like hey well yeah could probably do that with anchor points so I've got a layer here set up and I will just ask you okay this layer and in the mask I'm going to create an anchor point and here I'm going to create fill I'm going to grab on it you can also see this is a mask layer that you reference ink has got a little mask icon normal anchors won't have this and there's also notch and for which channel you want to use so and now we can add a filter a transform now I'm just going to randomly offset it in x and y and now when we paint in here we get two strokes that is cool in itself because this is also non-destructive so you can take this and move it somewhere else if you want really really cool something we we thought of was like you could essentially paint stereoscopic images by hand like this because you could transform this like so and then if you paint something on the lower layer it almost gives you like a stereo like anaglyph effect so yeah pretty cool trick number one offset painting well trick number two embossed stitching so this is something I stumbled across while patching up clothing for Lara on the latest tomb raider film so this one's really cool I've used this on every bit of clothing texture that I've done recently though the idea is got a brush we can create some stitches using the standard stitch brush like so let's just let's do it around his tummy who do okay so we've got some stitches here and the way I always do this now is I have a fill layer with some basic settings I just flat color a pretty high roughness and I've got my height set basically all the way up so that they they poke out and then obviously we can change the color of them or whatever we want and we'll leave them white for this and then what I'll do is create an anchor point on the mask that essentially gives us that I'll make a new layer turn everything off except the height because height is all I care about and I'll drop the height all the way down to negative one I'll create you mask create a fill layer reference the anchor point now we can see they're kind of fighting each other because we've got one layer going in and one layer going out but what we're going to do now is blur this we're going to go add filter you can see that's kind of giving us this soft thing and then you can see it looks like the stitches are actually digging into the fabric which is really cool so and then we can adjust the the width of it if you go too far I can't disappear so you have to be a little bit careful with it but you kind of see yeah once you've got this set up and it's smaller and it works really well it's a really a neat trick you see in here they're all indented so yeah emboss stitching using anchor points sorry converting color information to secondary map information so this is a really old-school shading sort of trick where you pull the blue channel the red channel or something from a bunch of mixed Maps to create like a quick bash like roughness map or height map or something like that we can't spoil with substance painter in that we don't need to do that a lot but sometimes it comes up like if we get a flat image from the client and we don't have any secondary maps we have to project it straight on we have to create your new secondary maps that tightly match what we've been given so just in this example I've got like three noise patterns creating a new kind of base texture but we've got no secondary hypothetically we've got no secondary maps so what we can do is take all that stuff and turn all these channels off and [Music] make this a pass through this pass and we'll add an anchor point on here so what this is doing is essentially flattening out everything that's under here into a single layer now in a new layer that's above we can turn off color and now we can start to populate the other channels using just the color information so we'll start with roughness being the most obvious one so we'll get the light so that's it right in the middle go to roughness anchor points select the pass through and then the color channel base color and then we've also got the levels parameter so we can invert it Auto levels it it will grab this and just pull it up and we'll set like a base roughness or maybe we want it the other way around you know oops you maybe something like that maybe I hutch I know we want this tune to dig right in so we'll grab the base color take the levels invert it and make it super crunchy just drop it down now you can see that's kind of like a ninh so yeah all sorts of possibilities with that but yet tip number three converting color information to secondary map information alrighty and the last trick for this video is turning mask information back into color information so this is super useful for a number of reasons as well sometimes you generate a mask and you're like I wish that was you know doing some effect later on well you can always reach back into a mask and grab it and colorize it so we'll do that on the default machinery material and what we're gonna do is grab this layer and we're going to make it as if it's got some rust underneath but then maybe some like illuminating acid or something on top of it so I've got a mission turned on in the texture set so let's first of all because we're going to convert this back to color information and this is very binary I'm gonna add a couple of extra masks just to get some more gradiation in there so I'm going to add a fill layer and something like that yeah so that's that's giving us some more of you see it's good it's gonna affect what's happening at this level but we can adjust that after yeah even though it's good enough for now add a new fill layer and all of these off let's create the anchor point under a mission we're gonna select the anchor point so you can see yet so that's like starting to glue now and got a ma so we can isolate that area well I know you - we don't okay gonna add a filter and under filters we're going to select gradient and this will allow us to colorize the the black and white input coming in so let's make the first range no DP mean thing like that and yes we want the gradient to work on the emission channel so to have color turn on a mission and so we'll pull this down you see that's starting to affect those other areas now now if I put this color up it's gonna glow everywhere so the black is actually acting kind of a bit like a mask at this point now what we can do because the anchor point lives here we can actually add stuff on top of this and this is only going to look down it's not going to look up so how we're saying we're going to come back and fix the fact that we've lost the corrosion happening on the actual base material well because we've got the anchor in the middle now we can add another feel and we'll add something really chunky in you you little bit that sort of gives you an idea so we're able to talk to both the materials built so I'm going to wrap it there for this video hopefully you guys have found it interesting and useful and if let's inspired you to play around the anchors in different ways if you haven't been using them already hopefully you've got a good idea of how to start using them now and hook up the micro detail mapping and stuff like that to really tie your layering and materials together so once again thank you for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: AJ3DVFX

Views: 27,804

Keywords: lookdev, substance, painter, allegorithmic, texture, textureing, painting, tutorial, shading

Id: M3A36NYbzzk

Length: 38min 36sec (2316 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2019