Getting Started Using Substance Painter & Cinema 4D

hey everybody ej here and recently i was asked to submit a piece of art for the dell precision 25th anniversary vr art exhibition and it was a pretty awesome opportunity for me to start learning substance painter and that's exactly what i'm going to be sharing in this tutorial today is how i started using substance painter alongside cinema 4d so let's check it out through this dell art gallery project substance painter has become a valuable new tool in my tool belt i've been having a ton of fun using it a lot of people say substance is kind of like a 3d photoshop and i totally get that analogy now so let's begin by talking about how you have to prep your model in cinema 4d to get it into substance painter so you can start adding materials to it to export your model to substance painter there is one important aspect of a cinema 4d file that you'll need to understand how substance painter will kind of translate it so you can see i have all of my objects here they're all made editable and what i did was created a just a normal c4d material for each and every object that i want to be represented as a separate texture set inside of substance painter so this means that for the tongue object i want to make a specific tongue material inside of substance and same thing with the body i want to make a separate texture from say the head and you can see that the ear texture is actually applied to both ears so what this means is that even though i have two separate objects in cinema 4d the fact that i have the same material applied to both of these objects means that when we bring this into substance painter we are going to be creating a single texture set or material for this ear texture that is going to be applied to both of these ears so if you want to create a texture a separate texture for the left ear and the right ear it's going to be very important that we actually create two separate textures so ear and like ear one then i gotta make sure i apply that ear one material to either one of the ears and this will mean that i can then create a unique texture for the left ear and the right ear same thing goes for the eyebrows if i just have this single material that is applied to both the eyebrows i'm going to just be creating one single texture that's going to be shared by both of these objects so you'll want to create a material for every different individual material that you want to generate inside of substance again it's not going to go by these objects it's going to go by these materials and these materials and the names will be the thing that will be brought into substance so make sure that you name all your materials because your object names are not going to come through just the names of the materials okay now optionally it's a good idea to go in and uv unwrap all of your objects as well now this is optional because you can utilize the substance painter auto uv that is actually really nice but for my purposes i went and just auto uv unwrapped inside of cinema 4d i'm going to go back to standard view and to export out your model we're just going to go ahead go to file export fbx and there's really nothing you need to change here the only important thing is that you need to make sure that the materials are going to come through because again if i go back and open my material manager here these are very important these are the things that are going to be loaded up inside of substance which you'll see very shortly so i'll just go to export fbx and this should be just fine hit okay and then just save out wherever and then you can import that fbx into substance painter inside of substance you'll load up your fbx file by going to file new and you'll choose the template that you want and for redshift octane you'll want to use this pbr metallic roughness and then you'll just select your file here so here's where you'll select your fbx file that you exported and here's where you can change the document resolution so if you want to work at a higher resolution like 2k or 4k you can change that here i'll change this to 2k and here is if you are working with udems you can use the udem workflow and also if you have not manually unwrapped your models in cinema 4d or another application you can actually use substance auto unwrap feature which is actually really really powerful and really great for those of you who are not that great at uv unwrapping i can't see i'm all that great but i already did my unwrapping in cinema 4d so i'll leave this unchecked and then we'll just hit ok and here is our model now for navigation we are going to be using the alt key a lot so if you hit the alt key and click and drag with your left mouse button that is your orbit if you hold the alt key down and you right click that is your zoom or you could also use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out and then alt middle mouse click will be your pan so you can adjust your view with using the alt key and your left right and middle mouse buttons now remember how i said that the material names and the materials that you make in c4d are the things that come through substance painter well here in our texture set list you can see all those materials and the material names are loaded up as a texture set list in substance and you can turn these on or off like so and then you can also paint on any layer directly in this layers area here so just like in photoshop there is a default layer if you go over to your shelf area over here you can load up a brush of your choosing and then you can go down to the properties of the paintbrush and maybe choose your base color here and you can start directly painting on that model so if you have the headdress here you can click on that and start painting on all of those different texture set lists here and start painting on their default layers substance painters real strengths is that it can utilize different aspects of your mesh like ambient occlusion curvature and normals to help drive different texture effects like say grunge or rust so to have substance generate those maps you're going to go and do that by going to edit bake mesh maps and here's where you can choose whatever different type of mesh maps that you want i don't need the id but i need everything else so we'll bake out the normal world space normal ambient occlusion curvature position and thickness you can also choose the output size so what is that resolution and you can up that all the way to 8k just for demo sake i'll keep that at 512 and i'll go and just bake selected textures and you're going to see this is going to go through all of the different texture sets and bake out all of those different mesh maps so with our mesh maps baked you can utilize substance painter's real strength it's smart materials which you'll find right here and a smart material is basically a procedural material that can utilize all the baked mesh maps and you can even generate your own and while you can generate your own smart materials there are plenty of presets that you can utilize right off the bat here in this shelf area so let's go ahead and let's try one of the gold armor and we'll just apply it to the face you can see on our head object here i can delete that default layer and you'll see this folder if i click the folder just give this a little bit more space you can see all of the different effects that are contributing to this kind of gold armor material can see a little bit of noise if you click on this ao dirt you can see here's our paint layer and here's the mask layer so again just like a photoshop layer you can also have your mask you can click on the mask and see what's happening on that mask you can see this like effect layer here let's see what's going on so if we look down here you can see all the way down here what effect here is doing it's using the world space normal and it's applying a custom grunge map here as well so you can go in here you can adjust the histogram position the contrast and you can see that's controlling that kind of like grunge noise that we have going on on that layer we look at the surface details you can see there is a cloud layer if i turn that on and off a cloud layer is basically a type of noise and then just a little bit of gaussian blur so gaussian blur effects so you can apply gaussian blur all type of effects just like you can in photoshop as almost adjustment layers or effect layers now if i go ahead and delete this gold armor and i go over to this normal materials area so we had smart materials here's our normal materials you can see a lot of presets here as well now the difference between smart materials and normal materials is if i drag and drop this gold pure onto our object you can see it's a single layer it's not a folder full of different layered effects so a material is basically like your material node inside of cinema 4d and redshift and octane where you can choose your base color you can choose the roughness level the metalness and you can even load up different types of noises to control say the roughness so i can load up a purlin noise and you can see that's going to be driving the noise so it's almost like we just plugged in a maxon noise into the roughness to drive the roughness value here and we can of course go down here adjust the contrast of that noise so if you're used to working with third-party renderers and building textures with nodes this is a very similar type of approach let me just go ahead and undo that now remember we baked out those mesh maps to create our own procedural material from scratch so we have this gold layer so let's choose something that contrasts the gold let's do this iron raw and we'll place that just above this gold layer so let's go ahead and create a mask so i'm going to go right click and add black mask and if i click on that mask layer i can right click again and add a generator now a generator is a generative effect that you can apply to either your mask or a layer you can see that our generator is empty so if i click on this little rectangle here i can load up all of these different type of generator effects you can see we have dirt we have curvature again these are different type of effects that are going to be able to utilize all of those mesh maps that we used so let's just go ahead and choose dripping rust that should be pretty cool and you can see exactly what's going on now you can see that that is also not only driving the mask on the base color on our diffuse layer but it's also contributing to our bump channel or our height channel so you can see with that dripping rust generator you have the ability to adjust all of these different parameters here and again this is controlling the mask and revealing that iron layer on top of our gold layer here so you can adjust the spreading the drip intensity and notice how these effects are being kind of isolated to the curvature areas the top of our model using the position map and all those mesh maps are really coming into play here now if you didn't want this to affect say your bump layer or your height layer so if i go to height i can go over to this actual layer and just bring down the opacity of this layer and get less intensity on that bump map or that height map i can go back to my base color and you can even adjust the base color of that iron so a lot of flexibility to be able to go into each individual channel and basically use a bunch of photoshop layers and effects to control your diffuse your height your roughness metalness and your normal now i can even click on this mask right click and add a paint layer and this is where i'll be able to go and use our brushes again so if i want to add say some crack show will do some cracks and you can see i can paint directly on that mask and kind of grunge up let's get a different brush here see i can paint on here and i'm actually painting black here if i go down to the brush go to grayscale and just crank this up to one this will be the white color so i'll actually be revealing that iron material here so you can use both effects and paint directly on a mask to be able to create whatever type of material look that you want in addition to all the smart materials and material presets you'll find in your shelf you can access a massive library of even more assets by going to this icon here which will launch the 3d assets in the creative cloud marketplace and you can see a bunch of really nice high quality materials here and importing them into substance is as easy as clicking the send to and substance painter and you can see how that loaded up right there and we can apply directly to our model just like so in addition to the 3d marketplace on the creative cloud desktop app you can go over to the 3d community assets area which is a collection of community-led 3d assets that is continually updated and where you can search for the exact material that you're looking for as well so let's go ahead and search for some sandstone which would be great for the sphinx and here you can see some sandstone and some stylized sandstone as well i'll click on that and see exactly what that looks like i think that is perfect so to go ahead and import this into substance i'm going to download this spsm file head back into painter and to load up that asset i'm going to go to file import resources i'm going to click this add resource and i'll find where i downloaded that sandstone you can see i downloaded a few of them here let's download this one here so you'll see this is going to get imported as a smart material so you have a few different options you can have this loaded up just in your current session so if you close out of substance painter it's going to get removed from your shelf or you can have it just live in your project or you can have this stored in your library where you can access it over multiple projects and i'm going to do just that so i can use it in any other project that i want to work on in the future so go to import and here you can see that sandstone smart material it's in our smart material library here on our shelf and i can just drag and drop this directly onto my model and let me go ahead and delete all those other layers that we were working with and you'll see just like the other smart material we checked out with that gold armor we have a folder here if we click on it we can untwirl and see exactly what is inside of this sandstone material and you can see there's quite a bit of stuff going on so if we click on some of these masks we can explore and take apart what is actually going on here and in dissecting smart materials is a great way to understand how substance works and how you can start to develop your own smart materials as well so if you look at the dark cavities you can see that there is a blur effect and then a mask editor which is basically just using a grunge texture for an input and it's also using all of these different mesh maps to control this orange color being applied to that object you can see that blur layer a blur effect is just like a gaussian blur effect in photoshop or after effects where you can adjust the blur intensity let's go ahead and check out a few more of the layers here so we have a scratch layer if i turn that on or off you can see exactly what's going on there and if i click on the mask and see what's driving that mask you can see that there's this metal edgeware effect that is being applied to it and you can see that it's using the ambient occlusion and curvature to drive this map as well as world space and position you can see all of the different type of parameters we have so if you want to adjust the where level that's basically just controlling how prominent those scratches are the contrast you can see the generator that is being used the metal edge wear so again that's just found by searching the generator area here so let's search for metal edgeware and you can see that's exactly what was loaded up here and you can also adjust that scale as well so smart materials and these generators are a very awesome feature inside of substance very very powerful and again the best way to learn about all the ways you can use all of these different type of effects is to go ahead and dissect all of the different smart materials here and also on the community led substance page so i'm just going to make a few tweaks to the colors here because i think this is a little bit too orange so i'll adjust the base color make it a little bit lighter so remember at any time you can go into any material channel and adjust how these effects are affecting say your height channel so if i go into the height channel and go down to the scratch layer you can see that that is contributing to the bump channel and i can even bring down the opacity there to maybe half that you can also use any type of blending mode just again just like in photoshop and anything that you do here is purely just going to affect what this layer is doing in the materials height channel so here you can see the final textured version of this pug sphinx and i basically just took that sandstone smart material made a bunch of adjustments and then once i was happy with it you can actually copy that same smart material to other layers so i can copy this layer go to the body let's just delete this material that was just here we can right click and paste those layers you can see that we can just apply the same effect to different objects and so i did the same thing copy and pasted it to the ears the eyebrows this little headband area here and one of the cool things is that in addition to copying pasting materials let's just say you wanted to create an instance of that face material i can go to the head i can right click and i can say copy layer go to the body i can right click and i can actually paste the layer as an instance and what that means is that if i go back to the head and adjust anything here it's also going to adjust that on the other instance material as well so this is a great way to create one material adjust it and have it be applied to multiple areas and automatically update so just like working with instances in cinema 4d you can do the same thing working with material instances in substance painter let's add one last finishing touch and basically what i want to do is on this little snake piece i want to draw some little cartoony eyeballs so to do that i'm going to go ahead and click on the snake texture set list i'm going to create a new paint layer you're going to see that that's going to be loaded up i'm going to double click on that layer type in eyes and then basically what i want to do is just paint on the bump map or the height map so what i'm going to do is go over to my shelf over here load up just the basic hard brush and you can see how big that is let's make that just a little bit smaller we can adjust the size either here or in the properties panel here you can adjust the size the flow the opacity all these different settings here the hardness and we can also paint symmetrically as well and to activate symmetry we're just going to click this button right here you can see that line going down the center and if i paint you can see that i painted white which is the color that's loaded on this brush and you can see we painted a little bit of height but i don't actually want to paint any color i don't want to affect the diffuse or the base color i only want to affect the bump or the height so to do that on this paint properties you can actually choose which channels you are affecting with this paint brush so i want to just affect the height so i'm going to select that and solo that by holding alt down and clicking on height and here is where you can adjust the height level so are you going to paint a positive bump or a negative bump i actually want to paint a slight negative bump here so if i click just once you can see how we just made like an indent there now if i make a positive bump and make the size a little bit smaller and if i start painting you can see i'm actually pushing this outward that's a little too sharp so let me undo all of that let's go back to our brush properties let's bring the hardness way down and let's go back down to our height let's make it a little bit negative adjust the size here that looks pretty good i like big eyeballs i'll make this just a slight bit bigger and let's click a few times to make a nice little indent then we'll make a positive dent make the size a little bit smaller for the iris and there you go now that's looking pretty rough for the most part let's go and let's add a blur effect to this and how we can do that is by right clicking on this layer and going to filter so a blur is a filter right now there's no filter selected and again i just want this filter to affect the height so i'm going to hold the alt key down and activate the height go to filter and there is blur and you can see how we can adjust the blur intensity here and make this just a little bit more subtle and we can even go back into this layer and keep painting and that blur effect is going to be doing its thing and i would say that's looking pretty good another thing we can do is maybe this bump that i have on the chin here is a little bit too sharp so i can go to the chin texture list here i can find this fill layer that has the lines on it right click and add a filter here as well again so the height by holding alt down or option and clicking and let's load up a blur here as well adjust the intensity you can see how that smoothed that out really really nicely so once you're done with your material it's time to export out all of your textures so you can start using it inside of cinema 4d or your app of choice and to do that we're going to go to file export textures and here's where you can choose where your export directory is going to be you can choose the output template the file type the bit depth you can adjust the resolution so if you want to export out a 2k or 4k you can do that here and then as far as what you want to export you can use custom output templates so there's even a redshift preset here that you can go ahead and load up as well and that's going to export out and that's going to export out your color your roughness metalness normal height which is your bump in emission color actually we don't have any emissions so we can just delete that and we can go to the list of export that we'll be exporting out as well as the file names you can see everything's looking pretty good right there and then to load up that redshift preset without the emissive we can go back to settings go to our output template and just choose that redshift and we can see the list of exports you can see the color displacement metalness normal and roughness that's exactly what we want and then we can just go ahead and export those materials and that will export all the materials for all of our texture sets basically all of our objects and now we can go ahead into cinema 4d so now we're back in our original cinema 4d file with all of our objects and all of our default materials here and we're going to replace all these materials that are already applied to our objects with our redshift material or if you wanted to use octane you can totally do that but i'm going to change my renderer to redshift and i'm going to go to material tools convert and replace all materials and this is going to exchange all of our materials convert them to redshift based materials if i double click one of my materials here you can see there is my espresso node based redshift material now at this point all we got to do is go and find all of our materials and load them up so here you can see here are the materials that are associated with the body as you can see in the file name itself i'm just going to select all these materials drag and drop them into my shader graph click yes and then at this point it's just connecting the right nodes to the right inputs so here we have our body color i'll go and import that into our diffuse color you can see that update in our viewport then we have our normal which we will need a bump map for so bump map the input and then we'll choose tangent space normal because this is a normal map and we'll put this into our overall bump input now our roughness we will plug into reflection roughness displacement height field that will be needing a displacement node we'll get our displacement here texture map output directly to the output and into the displacement slot and metalness we really don't even need because there are no metallic properties to the actual head so i can just totally go ahead and delete that so i'll go ahead and close out of that let's go and fire up our redshift render view and let's see what our texture looks like here so i'll hit play and let's add a light in here so redshift light dome light just some nice even lighting there to see our material and then to get the displacement working that is in our texture we will need to navigate to the object that we have the material applied to right click go to render tags redshift object geometry click on override tessellation and then enable displacement and you can see a little bit updated there but you'll see that the displacement is now going to be activated on our object so at this point we're just going to go and do the same thing with all of these different textures and load up those substance material the same way we did with the body so after replacing all of those materials and importing all of the substance materials here is what we got we got our pug sphinx with all the substance material applied to it inside of cinema 4d using redshift and looking pretty awesome now manually importing your textures from substance to cinema 4d for redshift or octane is kind of a pain to having to plug in all those nodes yourself so there is a plug-in that you can purchase on gumroad from this lotto zlatal studio oxalatol is that the little uh c guy but anyways you can download this and it's fairly decently priced and this will actually just allow you to import everything automatically and i think the time you'll save this is actually totally worth it so definitely check this out and you can see that it's compatible with a lot of different renderers and it's always updated so it's always current really wish this functionality was built into substance but at least there is this option here so here you can see what i ultimately ended up with and you can see i changed the color of the headdress and the headband but i mostly stuck with the materials i created in substance and then i just added the pug sphinx into this nice sand desert landscape which you can learn how to create in another tutorial i did i'll be sure to link that in the description but i sure am having a lot of fun using substance alongside cinema 4d to get really nice custom stylized materials and i can't wait to share more of my journey inside of substance painter and i'm really excited to share all of the things that i learned along with you thank you so much for watching hope to see you in the next tutorial real soon bye

Channel: eyedesyn

Views: 21,821

Keywords: cinema 4d tutorial, substance painter, substance painter tutorial, substance painter beginner, cinema 4d to substance painter, c4d to substance painter, c4d tutorial, motion graphics, 3d tutorial, 3d, eyedesyn, adobe substance, adobe substance painter, adobe tutorial, intro to substance painter, redshift render, redshift render tutorial, substance painter workflow

Id: c_-YGPFk630

Length: 28min 23sec (1703 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022