How to create a dent effect in Substance 3D Painter

hey this is Wes in this video I want to take a look at how we can use compare mask and anchor points in substance painter to create complex effects so here you can see that I'm creating this Dent effect in this video we're going to run through this process step by step so you can see exactly how this is done so now let's jump into substance painter and let's see how we can create this okay so here we are in substance painter I have my bottle and I've already started to work on creating this metal edgeware so I just have my simple generator I'll adjust this edgeware and you can see I have the metal edgeware alright so let's take a look at adding a dent so here my layer stack first thing I'm going to do is come over I'm going to create a fill layer and let's just call this Dent demo and this is going to be working just on my height information and I'm going to set my height value close to about well let's just set it all the way to negative one and you can see here that the main part of the bottle is already being displaced and that's because I already have my tessellation set up let's jump over here to the Shader settings and take a look at what I have so here you'll have your Shader settings and then on this tab I have displacement and tessellation here I have enabled my displacement tessellation my scale I have set to .02 and I came to this value by just you know looking visually and here in the viewport and seeing what level of scale I wanted to have so nothing crazy there so with that enabled we start to get this displacement and now that I have the layer set up I definitely need to mask this so now I'll come over and add a black mask and there we go all right so now we're ready to start working now with my mask selected I always like to create a paint effect I never just paint directly in the mask because that's very destructive so I like to create my paint effect I could even come in and start to you know give this some type of name so let's just say Dent this way I kind of know what I'm doing I have control over the opacity as well as my various blending modes I actually change that let's make sure it's back to normal so that's why I like to work with the pain effect just lets me have a non-destructive workflow okay so with that said and everything's set up now I can actually go in and paint my Dent so what I have over here in my assets library is this Dent brush that I created so let's take a look at what this is going to do here let me turn off this layer here at the top which is my hbao I'll come back to that in a moment so if I come in and I just go ahead and set up my brush let's just put a stroke right here and there we go I have a dent now you can see that this looks pretty cool it's actually denting into the surface again that has to do with that tessellation setting I had for my scale and now here on the fill layer because I'm working with height I can actually just interactively adjust this so here this is a negative I can even push this all the way to the other end of the spectrum and actually push this out here in the surface but I'm going to leave it at negative one for now and so that's the basis or the or the we'll say the base foundation for my Dent now for this brush let's talk about this for a moment so this is just a brush I created myself here in substance painter so if we go back to my paint effect layer I can look at my brush settings you can see that nothing fancy here uh just have the basic default brush and here for my value it's set to White so that I could you know paint with the full effect of my Alpha which here brings me to my Alpha so here I have this Dent Alpha now the alpha could come from anywhere right so you could you know a lot of times I'll go to different services and I'll find you know I actually use a lot of zbrush alphas and just import those into painter and I can use them in this particular case I made this Alpha myself using substance designer so let's just take a quick look at that so here's the graph for this I love designer it's really great for making you know extra not only materials but extra tools and and filters and generators that you might use in substance painter I use it often just to generate some quick Alphas so let's take a look at this effect so you'll notice that I have just the plane and I'm displacing it I use my 3D view here so I can just get a good idea of what the alpha is going to be doing and then here I just started with just the shape node so I get this effect here's what it looks like in the 2D View and then I'm going to use this noise and warp the shape so I'm using the warp node so I start to get these little wobbly bits in here and then I used a blur uh high quality blur grayscale because you can see without it we're getting this kind of really sharp crease I didn't want that so I just kind of blur it out a little bit and then I wanted to start kind of getting a little bit more kind of nuanced shape here around the outside so once again I just ran and found a grunge map that ships inside of designers something like this I just blurred it so I can get these nice little kind of chunks and then here I'm just blending it in with the subtract mode and then putting these two guys together so that's just basically giving me those outside shapes and then I subtract it by my base shape and there we go it's very subtle but we're just getting some of these little kind of cut in Groove shapes here now this is all I need to do I can then have this set to you know there's many ways you could work I could actually create this as a substance so create an output I could expose parameters and then when I'm working with that Alpha this is a lot of information just for the effect that I want to show but anyways it's pretty cool I I like to share this so uh you know like I was saying I could expose a bunch of controls I could do all that kind of stuff so that I could have this as a procedural Alpha and make changes I I just was going for something quick so the only reason why I created normal and this aiming inclusion is just so I could preview it correctly here my displacement as I was working on the effect but what I did was I had it set up and I just simply saved as a PNG and then you know dropped that back into substance painter so that's how I got this brush so once I assign the alpha you can always right click here and then you can choose to create a brush preset which is going to save your Alpha and all of your brushes okay so with that said if that's new information awesome uh if if it's if it's you've heard that before hopefully you could just skip over that pretty quick all right so again we have our brush nice great we have our Dent so one of the other things that I like to do with this is if we jump over here to our filters uh let's look in my library so I'll go to all libraries let's jump over here to where I have my filters uh this guy here and we'll do a search for uh HB that gives me my Horizon based ambient occlusion node so here I could just drag and drop this right into my layer stack and now I have the effect yeah I had already done that but you get the idea of what I'm doing here the reason why I'm going through this process is because it's just gonna give me a little bit more information so let's come over here and I can play around with the overall kind of Channel depth the intensity I can blur it let's just bring this down uh you can see I'm just kind of playing with this effect there so here is what it looks like without the ambient occlusion it's okay but you know it's kind of hard to see the overall kind of shape and form and with the AO there we have it so that's another good use of this HBO Excuse Me Horizon based ambient occlusion uh filter in order for this to work let me just say that you do have to come over to your texture set settings and make sure that your ambient occlusion channel is added so you can click the plus and add that channel into here so that you can work with that okay so with all that said uh let's see let me just drop that down slightly okay we have our Dent we have our metal edgeware but one of the problems that I'm facing here is that well you know I'm not really this edgeware filter that we have which is going to be this guy you can see that it's not really being it's not really affecting or being affected by that dent and so here is where I want to talk about being able to use things like anchor points and the compare mask option uh to kind of enhance this overall effect so let's build this up from scratch so first thing that I'm going to do now there's again just like with anything there's like you know tons of ways that you could go about working on this what I like to do is create uh you know another layer on top so we do have this this metal edgeware that's being masked by this generator effect right so I could try to like you know combine all of this into one effect but you know it doesn't really give me the full control that I wanted in the end so what I did was I created another layer on top and we'll call all this uh let's see um this is going to be dent metal so it's it's the it's the dent metal of the material um the material of the dent which is going to be metal and I'll call it demo so that we can see what we're doing here and then let's just set this up as a metal material really quick so over in my materials I'm going to just drop the value of that base color slightly let's increase my roughness well here keep it about like that let's set it to metallic and here we go we're starting to get a metallic Effect one of the things that I always like to do with metal I guess depending on the type of asset but I I like to use these filters here and I love these finishing filters that we ship with in painter so I'm going to use this matte finish getting cut off in the screen capture but it says matte finish rough and that is the filter we're going to use and so with this guy in place I can adjust things like the scale and the brushing intensity and get something like this kind of over driving it just so we can really get a good idea now I can jump back to my layer let's play with the roughness there we go so really quick way to create a nice kind of metal material all right with all that said we need to mask this so of course we're going to jump over here to our masking and add a black mask now we can start building up this generator or the excuse me start building up this this metal material so that it appears around where this Dent is going to be and to do that like I said we're going to start using anchor points so here in this Dent this is my original Dent material and I had my Dent paint effect so first thing I want to be able to do this is what this mask looks like so I just alt la left click here on the mask you can see I get this masking effect now what I want to do here is I want to Anchor this information and think of it like a pinpoint that we can reference later so to do that we'll come up here to our effects and I'm just going to add an anchor point and now I have this Anchor Point it's going to be named uh based on whatever the the uh the layer name is and it's going to append mask by it so you can change this if you want now one of the important aspects about anchor points is that wherever you pin this point in your layer stack and you want to reference it whatever you're referencing whatever is going to be referencing this point has to be above it right so for example always just remember this the layer stack is processing from the bottom upwards and so if I'm trying I can't reference something that's below it it doesn't know about it so I have this Dent metal demo I'm just going to drag this up here just above just as long as it's above my Anchor Point I'm good to go alright so now let's just get into the the aspect of building up this effect okay so we're going to jump back over here now a couple things we could do uh number one is I could just simply come into here and let's see what's some different ways I could I could come into here and I could add a fill layer and once you add a fill you can click on the grayscale button access your anchor points and now you can see that I have this Dent demo mask this is the one that I created I can select it and there we go we're starting to get this mask now what's interesting here is I could come in and I have a little levels controller to it so let's go and just start to kind of clamp this levels like this and if we wanted to we could try to build up the effect something like this okay so now you can see that well we're getting some of this raw metal in the area of where the dent is going to be and that's just one way to kind of reference that it's not going to be the way that I want to work right now but I could try to build up the effect this way you know copying and pasting the anchor over itself blurring it subtracting it and things like that that's that's another way you could work however one of the key points that I wanted to be able to do with this effect was I wanted to keep it as non-destructive as possible so let me show you what that means if we come over here to the layer itself I have this value right so the dent is basically on or pushed all the way in now what happens if I start to decrease the slider and I take it to zero okay well the Dent's gone but because of the way that I'm accessing the layer The Anchor Point straight through a fill like this uh what you end up getting is well okay the Dent's gone but that data painter still knows about that data so it's like oh well you know I'm still able to use it and this is not what I want what I want to be able to do is when the dent is basically at zero percent I want this this this scraped away kind of painted layer this raw metal that's showing I want that to be gone as well and so that's where I kind of run into the Dilemma what do you do well there's a really cool effect here inside of painter that we can use let's go ahead and bring our Dent back into the picture and let's go back here to that demo so there's a there's a really cool way that we can work with masks and if we come back under our add effect there's an option here called add compare mask so let's use use this so I dropped this right into here and this is really neat so what this is going to allow me to do is it's going to allow me to choose a channel I could choose any kind of Channel and then it's going to allow me to compare the information so for example I'm looking at my height information and I'm saying Hey I want to show a mask as long as this layer and you can see I have this option here is greater than the layers below it and then I have a hardness slider as well and it's going to give me a way to create an interactive mask which is really what I want to do so to help visualize this this is the mass that's being generated right now so okay once again like the fill I'm starting to get uh you know a mask where the dent is but because it's based on my high information but everything outside is just a middle gray I don't want that so let's do this let's come in and add a levels and then I'm just going to clamp this value so we'll do something like this to start let's see what this gets us okay I'll hit M on the keyboard to go back to my material mode and just like before with the fill layer with a compare mask into levels we now have this metal edgeware showing up where the dentist however the difference is this time if I come over to my fill layer and I start to adjust it look at this I can actually make that metal area disappear as well so now the height information is not only driving the dent but it's also controlling the intensity value of my mask you see the little thumbnail here it has it's just kind of Disappearing so here's what it looks like it just starts to fade back it gets smaller but and that's really really interesting okay so let's take this back you know just something else so you know like if we were to go the other way let's say instead of a dent we wanted this to kind of actually maybe you know kind of bump outwards so now we don't see our mask right well if we jump over to compare mask and we check or we just switch this to less than now we can get the same effect except in Reverse so that's pretty cool too uh all right let's jump that back to greater than let's come over here to our dent and let's set that back to negative one okay so here's where we are at this point we're able to uh kind of work with this effect now what I really want to do is add some more metal edgeware on top of this so let's do this inside of my mask you can see what we're doing here is we're building up what we call an effect stack so we have a compare mask we have levels and we're going to add another effect on top of it so this time we're going to add a generator jump over to our generators and I'm going to add that metal edgeware once again it's getting cut off in the screen capture but you get the idea and I have my wear level and my contrast so now we have two metal edgeware generators showing up or basically kind of combining on top of each other so for example this is what it looks like here you can see that we have the original metal edgeware that I had and then there's one showing up here on top of it and so what I'm going to do is just come over here to that original that metal that I just created that dent demo and actually here it is the metal let's just turn that off for now this is the underlying layer because we just want to be able to focus on this new version that we're building up okay so let's play around with this first off another way that we can use anchor points so we haven't really used the Anchor Point yet right we've used compare mass but where here's where the Anchor Point comes in so with things like generators we can come over here into the image inputs and you have these sections for things like micro normal and height and here's where we can actually reference Anchor Point data inside a generator so if I jump over here to the height micro height because that's where I've anchored my data and I go to my anchor points sure enough there is my demo demo mask let's add that in and then here you can see that we even have this little levels control here that we're going to play with so let's do this so we have this in place now we come over to our micro details and we just need to tell the generator hey this detail that's inside the image I want you to use it so we come over to micro height and I click true to enable it now you see it's very subtle let me zoom in really close something's happening right so true there it is I'm turning it on and off you can see something is happening great we got something let's play around with this so I can increase my curvature intensity my height detail intensity I can bring this up and now we're starting to get some wear inside the dent okay pretty cool that's kind of what I want to do but the problem is well what I mean kind of what I I want there to be edgeware being affected by this Dent but it's not what I want it's like I see it everywhere I just want it on the edges it's inside the dent it's all on the outside it's not it's not going to work so what can we do we can come back here to the level section and let's play around and see what we can do now here's something really cool I want to place the edge the the metal edgeware I want to place it along the outside ring of the dent right so I'm going to take my input white for the levels and just place it look at this this is pretty cool I can just adjust this so instead of the the edgeware showing up right in the center part of the dent we want to control it so that it shows up here on the outside okay and now we're getting some pretty cool you look at this these little shapes here this is pretty nice I like that all right so that looks good now we can play with things like our height detail intensity so we can you know bump this up a little bit we can play with that curvature we can I don't think the AL radius is doing much for us but we can play with some of these values now right so our curvature is up we can play with the overall kind of wear level of this so Crank It Up slightly uh grunge amount we've got all these values right so we'll come back to this stuff here in a second okay so now we have the effect showing up on the outside but it's also showing up everywhere else we definitely don't want that this is super easy all the generators have these blending modes so here's what we're going to use the blending mode Let's just come in and drop that to multiply and there we go we have the effect isolated to the dent but on the outside of the dent now that we have things kind of set up here's where we can go in and start to tweak this and try to get this and More in line around the ranges that we want so here you know I won't spend a ton of time on this but I'm just playing with it just to see what I can kind of do let's do something more like that I don't know we'll just see what that does okay fine that looks good now let me go ahead and enable my secondary or my primary metal edgeware on top so now you can see the two are blending together the only difference being is that you know they're just different values right so I can see that this metal is a little bit darker no problem I'll come over let's just grab my eye drop tool and just select there and there we go that brings them more in line and then like I said I can play with this roughness if I want looks like it should be a little bit you know not as rough okay and there we go I have my edgeware showing up alongside of that dent now the big thing here that's really awesome about this like I said is it's really non-destructive because of the way that we're using this compare mask so now let's go back to our layer where we have that dent demo and let's start to just play with this so here you can see that as I set this back to zero so no Dent no Edge wear we start to increase the dent in and now it starts to show up like this so we can kind of just dial this effect up and down so one so the actual metal edgeware is now dependent on that actual uh Dent height information that's showing up within it and then of course we could take this even further if we want so for example if we jump over here into the effect stack we can again continue to play around with all these settings maybe by curvature intensity uh let's just drop this stuff down a little bit you know I could keep playing with this I could also come in and add something like a fill on top of it let's come over I'm already doing a search here for some grunge texture so just let's just grab something really quick I'm just just a grunge map we throw it into here maybe we go in and tile it yeah I don't want to do that yet let's do this uh let's add some contrast play with our balance and then here again we could go in and we could you know multiply that in so it's just kind of breaking that up so it's it's like here I feel like this was a little bit too uniform I mean it's not it's like broken up but you can see I still get like a perfect circle but now with the grunge map on top we just kind of crunch into it and this looks a bit more organic right now of course I could come back to my actual Dent this is where I'm painting my Dent effect and let's create another dent now that we have everything set up so we'll come over maybe in this area and just paint a dent and here we have a dent now you'll notice well I can see my effects not showing up the only reason that that is happening is because here in my Dent metal demo this is the again the grunge the edgeware this extra kind of fill layer that I put on top is just overriding so if we look there was my Den effect right so what we need to do if you come in you can see what this guy's doing here so we just need to adjust this guy so he shows up correctly and it's just the way that this overall mask is working uh so again if we look you can see that uh there's it's just kind of black in this area so it could help if I maybe tile this grunge a different way let's try that so if we come into here and we set this guy back to like multiply and then maybe we tile it or something yeah see how we can start to get that effect different ways it just it's just how this this grunge map is mapping here onto the surface so I may want to use a different map or something like that if I want to do that but the cool thing is is that you can see that once we set this effect up I can you know just continue to paint and work with that so I'll turn that off for now we have our two demo our excuse me too dense and now that we have this set up so let's take a look here I'm going to delete you know these these original layers so then I have this effect right so here's what I would do if you come over I'll create a smart material and I'll call this Dent effect let's grab these two layers we can drag and drop them into here uh one of the things I like to do is uh select this guy and let's see we could select the layer itself and usually when I have a layer like a mask where it's going to have uh like let's call this uh paint effect uh let's do this here so I could you know give myself or any one of my team like a good notice this is where you're supposed to paint the effect and then I like to use the different inputs so I'll say like green this is going to be like a an input that I need to paint in uh then what I could do is here we could actually go in let's just grab my Eraser or here let's do this let's just get rid of the layer We'll add a paint there we go and then we could say start here let's just do that okay so then you know they could come in and they could start here to add the effect wherever they wanted and now this is all part of a smart material so if I right click and I choose to create a smart material this is going to make a smart material for me and so here it is so if we turn this off now I'm in a new project I want to use this I can just drag and drop this here into my layer stack I could come over here to my Dent start here let's scale this guy up and paint there we go got my Den effect so set it up once we can reuse it again and again across the various projects and so that concludes this video as you can see using compare mask and anchor points are great tools for you to create complex effects and materials in substance painter thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Wes McDermott

Views: 49,095

Keywords: adobe, dents, substance3d, substancepainter

Id: Ml1iSGVMak4

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022