High to Low Poly Texture Baking with Substance Painter and UDIMs

hey everyone following up for my last few videos on how to model optimize and uv map complex objects this video will focus on how to import and set up your 3d models that use udems in substance painter i will cover final model preparation the import export process baking mesh maps with high to low detail and how to use uv tiles masks and material ids to organize your work in substance painter i will be using maya for this demo but the concepts and workflows discussed here can be applied to any 3d software as always like subscribe and share is always appreciated as i continue to grow the content of this channel so with that let's get started alright so here we are in maya and the first thing that i want to cover is just the final preparation on the model and final checks on uvs alright so as you can see here we have the low poly model or the optimized version of the high poly subdivided version here this is sitting at about 12 000 faces or just under 24 000 triangles which is going to be used as a hero asset for some high-res renders and for some high-res resolution captures out of uh the real-time software all right and then we have here the subdivided version that we're going to be going over shortly now it's just some basic cleanup stuff is typically at least my specific is selecting the model deleting history and freezing transforms the other thing that i like to do is just go to file optimize scene size and you can hit the dialog box there and what this does is just it goes ahead and gets rid of a lot of the fluff and stuff that you don't need throughout the scene file and just cleans things up so you go ahead and hit apply and it goes ahead and does that keep in mind it's not undoable so make sure to save before doing this so you go ahead and do okay and you go ahead and have a smaller and cleaner scene file and gets rid of all of those annoying nodes inside of your hierarchy once we have our scene and project cleaned up the next thing that we want to do is take a look at the normals of our object so in maya specifically if you select your object and you hold shift right click you can see you have soft and hardened edges and then you can do harden edge and soften edge now typically we want to go ahead especially when baking detail and do a full soften edge now just so you know the difference this is what it would look like with hardened edged you may find some faceting and not really issues but they'll cause issues when you go to bake i see a lot of people a lot of students when they go and start doing the baking for the first time they forget to soften their edges and to apply smoothing groups to your models and you'd find smoothing groups pretty much in any other software 3ds max also uses smoothing groups you can also find that here at the top with mesh display and then soften edge so go ahead and just soften edge and that goes ahead and just smooths all the face information edge information and it uses an angle of 180 degrees which is exactly what we want because it's going to smooth all of the edges here regardless of the angle you can see this is a 90 degree edge between these two faces here and it's just going to go ahead and smooth that all right and what we're going to do again is just bake this high poly detail down to this the low poly which is why we want to go ahead and set that smoothing group all right so once the soften edges are all set the next thing we want to do is quickly check our uvs and if you go to uv editor you can see that in here and if i go ahead and actually select the low poly you can see that our udems are all properly set up now what i've done is go went ahead and just kind of created just a little subgroup in here that organizes everything based on the uv channel or the uv coordinates and you can see that it went ahead and everything's looking pretty clean here i did go ahead and organize this from the last video that you know just makes a little bit more sense and i gave this about five udems all right so you can see we have one through five and this is just my naming convention but if i go ahead and actually select some objects you can see this in the coordinate system one zero zero three and i just made this group one zero zero three and then same thing here for 104 or a thousand and four and then a thousand and five now here's the key thing you have to be very careful when exporting into substance painter or else it'll cause issues is if sometimes you use the layout here and you go ahead and do layout and it goes ahead and tries to pack it and what you may find is that sometimes when it goes ahead and packs it there may be some uv shells that are bleeding over and so you'll notice it within the coordinate system if you have this enabled here which is just going to do the display image with this checkerboard i typically like doing that just as a quick check to make sure that i have no bleed over into any other udim tiles here all right so i'll go ahead and undo that and make sure all my uvs are good and i have everything organized properly and i have everything structured very cleanly and you can see how i have it here with these groups that are just there just for the sake of organization and then within here we'll take a look at quickly looking at naming convention naming convention is going to be incredibly incredibly important because i want a substance painter to know when it bakes this top piece to bake and take all the information from just this top piece here okay now it's going to go ahead and do that because these two are the same names except for the underscore so you can see here this is mesh underscore top underscore low this is i go ahead and hit this mesh underscore top underscore hi so it's going to find the same name and then find underscore low underscore high and then use those specifically for baking which is going to help especially when we have a lot of intricate details and i don't want any issues when i bake this top piece for it to maybe pick up some of the surrounding piece here so if i go ahead and actually disable the checkerboard you can kind of see what i mean sometimes with very very tight pieces in here that will cause issues when you're baking now we can always you know re do another bake with ambient occlusion uh if we need that but for now i want to make sure to pull primarily the curvature information the normal information and everything that i need from this high poly model okay so that's why naming is very important and as long as the objects are based off of the same name you're fine even if you have some subgroups i ran a couple of tests and everything worked fine when it was in substance painter all right so after naming conventions and everything's clean the next thing we want to take a look at is the material id so i just went ahead and just started applying just materials to the high poly and not the low poly that's because i want to capture this color information to create masks for the low poly now keep in mind when working in substance painter and i'll show a quick sample of this or quick demo is that when you do use multiple materials in substance painter you're going to have multiple texture sets so for this in this instance i want this to at least be one texture set with multiple udim tiles and then we'll also use masks and then i'll also show you how if you wanted to break this up into multiple materials or multiple texture sets and also use udems you can still do that all right so the material ids are basically broken up based off of the reference that i have right over here and you can see kind of how things are broken out and here's the cyberpunk reference of this that i found on art station from filippo bertino and you can see how basically things are broken up so you can see basically these metal pieces here i have all as kind of one main object or one main material id and you'll see that i have the top and bottom ones as the same material ids and then the mid piece and then the glass and so on and so forth there's also some internal components here that i also have broken up so that is basically what i'm using and you'll see also how i've gone ahead and broken this up where we have the blue here being that separate material id and then the green piece even though it's all one combined object here i can create custom masks from this material id and color id and i'll show you how to set that up it's incredibly incredibly powerful all right so those are the key things as far as just quick model preparation so you want to make sure that you optimize and clean your scene clean up your models make sure that your normals are all set up make sure your udems are cleaned use proper naming conventions and then use material ids where you can once all of that is set up i will go ahead now and set the subd back to the same origin point as the low poly model and we can go ahead and start exporting so now let's take a look at exporting these models out the first thing that i want to do is go ahead and export out the sub d the high poly model and keep in mind this is a sub d model with two subdivisions on it you can see that if i set this back to zero this goes back to the original sub d model so i make sure to keep that information there so don't delete history of the smooth face uh i did keep a backup of that here just in case i accidentally did that so just something that you always want to do but go ahead and select that and then do a file export selection right over here now once you do this file export selection you can just navigate to whatever folder in this case i i'm in my maya projects folder in my substance and then export i'm just going to call this grenade underscore hi all right so i'm gonna then use just these normal or current preset of just auto media entertainment all right i'll go ahead and export that and it's going to go ahead and think and then export and do its thing and then i'll go ahead select the low poly one hit control 1 to isolate press that a couple times to toggle and i'm going to take this one now into a file export selection and we're just simply doing this as the low poly and the high poly using the default fbx presets so we have underscore low and there we go we can do export selection very straightforward part of the process now let's jump into substance painter so if i go ahead and open up substance painter here we are here so this is a clean blank scene within substance painter and what i want to do now is go ahead and set up the model with unims so if i go to file new we want to go ahead and just use the standard pbr metallic roughness workflow i want to select the low poly model here so i'll suck low and then i want to set the document resolution i pre i typically bump that up to 2k if you have a lower end machine i would work at 1k but it doesn't matter as far as you can export at a higher resolution normal map find directx and then here's the important one use uv tile workflow so if i go ahead and enable that and then preserve uv layout per material and enabling painting across tiles that's exactly what i want i don't need anything else here i don't need any cameras or any uvs and everything else is the same so you can take a look at what i'm using here and then simply do ok and import and then give that a second and then there you go here's our low poly grenade all right so we can see if we go ahead and double check that's the low poly wireframe now to confirm though that you do have uv tiles or udim tiles there we go look at that right so we made sure you'll notice right off the bat this new icon that you wouldn't see unless you have udims and then you can see clearly in the 2d to 3d view so if you toggle between f1 f2 and f3 you'll see that the u dims are here and this is using one zero zero one two thousand two thousand three thousand four thousand five all right so now that we know that our u dims are here and they're working properly we can go ahead and do the baking that we want all right so we now imported it we conver we verified our udems are there and then we go to texture set settings and we scroll down a bit and then we go to mesh maps here and then i just do bake mesh maps all right so now what i want to do is i will go ahead and set this to 2k you can work at a much lower resolution if you want and then i want to make sure here under our common settings is under high definition meshes i want to go ahead and add in the grenade high all right so go ahead and do that we brought that in and the next most important thing that we want to do is take a look at this where we have match it says always we want to change that from match always which is going to do the entire model to match by mesh name so go ahead and do my mesh name and keep in mind we want our low poly prefix being underscore low and then underscore high for the high poly and you can see that if i go back in here we have the underscore low for all of our individual meshes here and then we have our underscore high here on all of our high poly mesh for our high surface detail all right so back to substance painter that's all working and then i pretty much i'm just going to use the default settings here and see how it does uh the other thing is just if you double check under material id it is using color source as material color so you can do this with vertex colors or mesh ids or something like or anything else like that but for now i'm going to simply keep it a material color so if i go back to common and then i guess one thing is you can double check here now that you have udems you can see that you can individually select the uv tiles that you want to bake so that is also an option so not only would you have if you had multiple texture sets you can individually bake out the utm tile so you wouldn't have to go through and bake all 35 textures again but since this is the first time let's go ahead and bake the textures and i'm going to go ahead and let that run okay and there we go so that went ahead and finished and let's take a look at our model so far so good because we went ahead and set up the material or the naming conventions and then i will take a look at the material ids everything baked out very very cleanly i did some earlier tests without using mesh by name and i ran into quite a bit of artifacts so if you follow this technique this is definitely going to save you some heartache later down the road but this all in all looks really really clean and then of course i can bump up the resolution or do some uh include aliasing so if you actually hit ctrl shift b and to help minimize what's called aliasing here on in this area there you can actually scroll down to anti-aliasing and you can tell it to sub sample and that's going to help it's going to definitely take longer but it's going to help reduce that issue or just bump up the resolution of the bake textures okay so now that we have that and if we actually take a look here you can see where it's at in our project settings you can see that all of our normal textures that baked out here now have a big old number five and that's five for the number of udem tiles that we have here so let's quickly the last thing i want to do is just quickly show you how to use these uv tiles as the final setup so for example i'm going to go to smart materials here and i'm going to grab a metal material so i'll use just this steel painted rough damaged and i'm going to go ahead and drop that in on the texture set so here's here's the difference that i'm talking about you can see now that we have texture set lists so our texture sets are based off of this one material that we have okay then within this texture set we have all these uv tiles now we can combine this with using masks so if i select this folder now okay and actually before i set the mask i'll go ahead and set this uv tile mask right so set this uv tile mask by now disabling anyone that i don't want so i know i'm not going to use these middle ones so if i'm just all i'm simply doing is hovering in the 3d viewport you can actually simply left click boom and see now it has disabled that okay so it went ahead and just disabled that or you can just check hit this checkbox here and then there you go okay great so now that i've done that i can go ahead and exit out of that here out of my uv tile masks and go back to painting here but what i'll do now is grab a red painted so we can maybe just use that as a contrasting color on the interior so i'll go ahead here and you can see that i have i'll do just steel painted maybe this brighter one here steel painted and i'll drop that at the very top here okay so obviously it's affecting everything so you can also right click and exclude all tiles and then just bring back the two or one or two that you want okay now what i want to do is you can see that they're overriding each other but if i want to only affect these inner parts these inner pieces let's do that as a mask so if i select this folder here right click add black mask so now that we have that black mask we can go ahead and mask off this inner area as material id so if you remember if i go back to this high poly subdivision look at that this is a completely separate material for my mask okay if this is all green i wouldn't be able to do this and i'd have to manually create this mask or create it as a separate texture set so if i go back into substance painter you can see that i have this black mask here i go ahead now right click on the black mask and then i go down to add color selection now i can use essentially my id mask which is auto connecting it from when we baked it as a material id and i want to do pick color so once i do pick color look at that all of these colors now are coming from our high poly model that we set up with materials as our material ids so go back to substance painter and select the blue and would you look at that now i have the black as the main black metal painted then i have the red painted on the inside which is scraped and chipped and then there you go and so i can start setting that up with materials separate materials with masks with the combination of using the uv tile masks here now keep in mind if i did go ahead and add you know these if i added another section here none of this is going to be affected because that i'm using these black masks here okay so keep that in mind as you're working through and or i i should say i should turn that off and then i can add this uv tile and you can see that it adds that entirely there okay and then if i add this one the two differences being that i am using a black mask here for the insertions here these inserted in extrusions and then this one's just using a uv tile mask so by combining uv tile masks with black masks and material ids you have incredible incredible amount of control now you can take that one step further all right and i'm going to go ahead and remove that one here and we can go back to just regular painting here and i'll go actually remove this and we want to just look at kind of our normal paint and one thing you can do here is if you maybe create a new layer here so i'll just do like maybe just a normal paint layer that i'll add on the top you can see i can put the custom tiles on you can actually set which ones that you want so if i disable these other two and then i go back to this paint layer and then i can use this icon here which is paint strokes ignored mask uv tiles i can remove any uv tiles that i don't want because keep in mind for when it comes to udems and ud uv tiles that all this is doing right here is uh it is allowing you to paint you can see that once i simply flip that on it's actually applying it but it's just masking it okay when you want to specifically paint you can use the setting here paint strokes and ignore mass uv tiles so then if i select that and go back to uv tiles you can see now i can actually take a look at the inner piece here that i have for the internal pieces so actually it's four and then there we go i can take a look now and start painting on this internal piece okay so that about covers it and then the last thing is if you wanted to you could combine that with multiple texture sets with with you dean with unims and multiple materials so if you wanted to as usual you could go back to your low poly here and if i wanted to maybe just simply separate out the internal pieces here so i can grab these i would just simply select this material assign a new one so it's a different color and then i go ahead and apply that and bring that back into substance painter so i'll do that really quick and then show you what i'm talking about okay and here you are so now you can see that i've went ahead and assigned a separate material for the internals that is separate from the rest of the low poly so you can see that if i grab this internal piece it's a darker separate material you can see here under this it's grenade internals matte and then this one is simply just the grenade mat okay that's in materials and so now that i'm in here i have grenade interior internals as a separate texture set and but it's still following the same udims right i've changed nothing about how i've set anything up but all i did was just give it a separate texture set so i can actually take a look now and you can use this where i can actually hide the grenade itself as a texture set if you don't want to use this or as a different workflow okay so i wanted to make sure that you understood how to combine texture sets how to combine uv tile masks how to combine the regular layer masks here and then how to combine folder masks here that you can see and to combine that with material ids to get incredible incredible organization and control over how you handle youtubes and this is the workflow that i'm going to use to essentially texture this entire grenade so this video is just taking you through the process of bringing it in from maya all the way into substance painters with keeping you dims uh keeping udem's support and then allowing you for complete control and organization so that wraps up the video i hope you found this helpful if you have any comments or suggestions uh let me know down below and i will be covering how to texture this grenade or at least some techniques that i'll be using in a future video so with that i'll see you guys around and stay safe

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 38,194

Keywords: maya, 3d art, autodesk, tutorial, export, 3d model, substance painter, adobe, allegorithmic, workflow, import, how to, UDIM, UDIMs, UV tiles, tile, texture sets, masks, mask, high to low, hi, lo, poly, polygon, optimization

Id: ST0Z6wIQBuI

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021