How to create a snow material in Substance Painter

photogrammetry can be a great tool for capturing 3D content in this video we're going to take a look at how we can use substance painter to specifically enhance the material I'm going to be creating a snow material and we're going to add this to our scan so let's jump in and check it out I'm going to start with a new document and for my document resolution I'm going to set this to 4K and for the file I'm going to come over to my tree stump and I have this asset that I scanned using substance 3D sampler's new 3D capture capabilities now at the recording of this video the 3D capture is not available just yet but I will have a new tutorial ready to go when this feature goes live but for now I'm just using the stump USD file that you can export and we'll click open using the new USD import and substance painter 8.3 I have this subdivision setting now because this is a scan it's very dense I don't actually need to set this and I've already done the UVS through substance Samplers so make sure that auto unwrap is disabled and let's click OK substance painter is now going to build the project and here you can see that scanned mesh that I want to work with now I need to import the material so I'm going to come over here to file and choose import resource add my resource and here you can see that I have this SBS AR file now this is also exported from substance sampler when you use the new 3D capture so I'm just going to select stump let's click open it's going to save it as a base material and I'm going to import this right into my project click import and now I have my stump material I can just simply drag and drop it here onto the mesh to apply all of the textures that are coming from that scan and so here is my scan I'm pretty excited about this feature and like I said I'm going to cover this a lot in future videos one of the really cool things about this is that you know I have my base texture but using the capabilities within substance sampler I'm able to use the image to material functionality to go ahead and generate for me maps such as my roughness and my normal information which is pretty awesome okay so now I'm ready to get started enhancing this scan by creating new material tools and blending materials painting whatever I need to do here in substance painter the first thing I'm going to do is jump over here to my texture set settings and I'm going to add an ambient occlusion Channel I think it's getting cut off a little bit there in the screen capture but I've added an ambient occlusion Channel and I am going to jump in and do some baking here so let's go into the big mesh Maps what you're seeing here is the new Baker system that is again found in 8.3 all right so for my common settings let's set this here I'm going to go to 4096 for my bake I do not need a normal I was able to generate that normal right from substance sampler which is pretty nice so World space I want that no ID I do need ambient occlusion I'm going to bump this all the way up my secondary raise pretty high I like to do this just to enhance the overall quality here get the best quality I can same thing with my curvature let's jump those secondary Rays up to 256. I am going to bake uh position leaving the default settings here which is going to be all axis and the normalization type is set to be sphere with full scene now I don't need my thickness okay so these are going to be my core bakes I need to do so let's jump over here and bake my selected texture sets you can see that painter's gonna run through this here pretty quick things are looking good and once we get this finished here we are then going to be able to start creating my material okay so it's done we can return back to our painting mode and now we have the bakes that we need you can see they're placed here in my texture set settings so now I'm going to jump over here to my actual layer stack where I have my stump I have a single texture set or single material for this 3D scan the 3D capture mode in substance sampler is pretty powerful because it allows me to do some mesh processing I was able to go in and do a decimation as well as rework the UVS so if we take a quick look here at my 3D 2D split you can see here is what my UVS look like for this 4K scan again I was able to recreate these UVS directly from sampler and so we have this single material that we're going to be working with so before I get into creating my stone material I may want to jump into the actual maps for the skin and address any issues I have so for example if we jump over here into let's say my ambient inclusion Channel I have the ambient occlusion information that's coming here from this substance material again exported from substance sampler however once I get into using generators later on I want to combine this channel information with the actual bake information that I did earlier that's precisely why in the start I created this a b inclusion channel so let's go ahead and take a look at how we're going to work through our ambient occlusion so first thing we're going to create a fill layer and I'm just going to call this AO and I'm just going to have this AO Channel enabled I'll jump over here to my uniform color button and I'm doing a search here for AO and I can see I have my AO bake that's the actual mesh map excuse me the occlusion map from mesh bake so we're going to use this and now you can see here if we jump over again into my texture set settings because the ambient occlusion mixing is set to multiply we're now combining those two maps together now the reason I'm doing this is because now I have this layer here in my stack that lets me have this ambient occlusion data which is a combination of the bake itself and any information I'm adding to AO in my layer stack that's great because later when I use generators I want to use this full capture of my ambient occlusion so what I'll do is come over here to my effects and I'm going to use an anchor point for this information now one of the things I'm seeing right off the bat though is if I zoom in oh I have some bake errors here so if we look at just the ambient occlusion bakemap itself you can see that that's the bake from the mesh we lost a lot of that detail again that I was able to get in substance sampler using image to material but now just looking at the raw bake I have some problems here so let me show you how we can fix this so the next thing I want to do is create a paintable layer and I call it fix now what we're going to do is use our clone tool so I want to set all the blending modes to pass through so if I right click on the layer we have our option here for blending modes now first I like to just set the first blending mode so it's set to base color let's just click our drop down here and set this to pass through and then we right click the layer choose blending options and then apply blending mode to all channels so now every channel if I jump over to ambient occlusion has passed through set okay so now that we have this in place what I can do is come over here with the layer selected I'm going to come over to right now I'm just looking at my bake Maps I don't want to do that I want to look at the channel my aiming inclusion Channel information uh now because I have this fixed layer using passthrough I can actually paint on this so what I'm going to do I have my clone tool enabled and I can hit V to just sample an area and here I have this little bake error so let me just paint this right out and you can see I made a mistake because I wasn't paying attention to the channel that I'm working on so let me just undo that right click and you have your channels now the reason why I set this to pass through for all channels is because this fixed layer I may want to use this to fix other issues maybe there is an issue in the color map or the normal or something like that that I want to address I can do so by just enabling the Channel I want to paint on so in my case here it's going to be ambient occlusion I don't need to mess with the color so I'm just going to turn that off and now once again I'll hold V to sample an area and then I'll paint and you can see I can just clone out this mistake so any of these issues that I have so I'll go through the process here and just fix my bake this technique is also really good for fixing Distortion areas so here I can see because of just the way the UVS were done uh inside sampler I have some Distortion I'm also getting this bake error but no problem because I can go in here and I can just fix that Distortion by just painting this so this like I said this is a great method for going in and being able to tweak and fix and change any issues that you have in your bait Maps and going back to my layer stack looks like I made a little mistake I put the Anchor Point on this first layer and you know actually want to make sure that I'm anchoring the data that I fixed so let's just remove that Anchor Point and let's add an anchor Point here for fix and we'll just call this um scan fix so now we have this data as an anchor point and we can use it anywhere else in our layer stack like in generators and things like that and we know that I'm going to have this uh any of the issues fixed here so now we're going to take a look at adding the snow so let's start by creating here a folder I'm going to call this snow and then I'm just going to create a fill layer and I'm going to call this base now on this base layer you can see that I have things like height and normal enabled and what I want to do is have the height and normal Channel overwrite any of the scan information below it so since I placed this into a folder group what I'm going to do is just copy my blending mode to all the channels so here I have my base color set I can see it set to normal so I'm going to right click and choose blending options apply blending mode to all channels and this is going to give me the start here of my actual snow now one thing that I am seeing here is it appears that the correction that I did for my ambient occlusion is starting to come back here into the mix like why is this showing up here once again well because I've actually gone through and fixed this issue here in the layer stack and I know that this is going to now be a combination of my baked information as well as the ambient occlusion information coming from my substance material what I can do at this point is just jump over to my texture settings once more and now what I need to do is just turn off this ambient occlusion mixing I need to switch this from multiply to replace so once I've done that if we go back and enable the snow you can see that that error is now fixed but if we go back to our single Channel and look at that ambient occlusion information let's turn off our snow you can see that here I have both the combination of the AO from the material as well as the bank okay so with that said let's get back here to our snow and you can see that I'm completely overriding that ambient occlusion here in the snow layer for now which is good so here let's go to this base this kind of represents the overall base material and I want to create a pretty rough uh surface at this point so let me set it to something around 0.8 or so for now and we'll get back to this now for the base color I definitely don't want to use Pure White and physically based rendering we never have an absolute white or an absolute black value in our texture map so you can see here I'm using just this kind of off-white value the default's pretty good so I'll go with that okay so now I'm going to create another layer on top of this and we're going to call this detail and this is just going to add some height information here so I'm going to alt left click on my height channel so I just exposed that information and I'm going to give it just a little bit of a height value to start now what I like to do is set my height as a slider and then mask in some information and that basically gives me a little bit of a procedural control here for this height so with this layer selected I'm going to create a black mask I need to add a fill and then from here in my library if I do a quick search here for a fractal you can see there is a fractal sum bass noise this is pretty good I'm going to go with this guy so we'll plug this into the grayscale input and now you can see we're starting to get a little bit of detail into the snow I'm going to jump over to my fill setting and set this here to be a triplaner and then I might title this noise maybe a value of two and that looks pretty good so now we're starting to get just some nice detail here for that snow starting to look a little bit more like snow all right uh and like I said now I have this procedural control so I can dial this up and down so if I want to just increase this value a little bit more I can do so just by changing the slider I love being able to create my materials this way like I said it gives me this little controller so let me set the value around 0.54 and with that I'm going to come over to my mask and add another layer on top of this so I'll add another fill and this time I'm going to do a search for I like to use this one a lot clouds two so I'm going to left click drag and drop and place this into the grayscale input as well so now we have clouds two we want to set the projection to triplanar right off the bat and then I'm going to tile this let's see let's just try a couple values here so we have something like say four maybe six and that might be too much but let's let's try let's try three okay let's see what this is gonna do so here in clouds uh what I want to do is come back here to my setting and I need to set this to something like say multiply so we're going to multiply this and then start to play around in here with this balance setting actually I'm going to change this blending mode to Max lighten instead that's actually going to combine the two maps together and then again another quick tweak here to that balance and you can see that now I really like the effect that I'm getting here so we have some detail and then we get what appears to look like some snow build up here in this corner so I think this is going to work just to give me a little bit of um some detail here and I can just like I said play around with this as much as I want but uh that looks pretty good okay so with that said we have our detail layer now the next thing we're going to do is add one more layer and this is going to be my roughness information alt left click on the roughness Channel and now what I'm going to do is uh inside the roughness Channel instead of creating a mask I'm just going to add a map right here into the roughness input and there is a nice map that I like to use let's see this guy is called gradient it's this one here gradient flakes so this is uh this is pretty good this is going to be perfect for these little snowflake glints that I want to get so let's grab this image drag and drop it here to the roughness input and now in my drop down here I'm just going to hit C on the keyboard to cycle through my channels and let's go to roughness so this is my roughness information way too large to start so let's set this to triplanar and maybe set this to a value of say 4 looks pretty good and I also have some controls here for like my pattern X and Y amount I can play with that on my triplanar let's see here hardness I can play with this value let's just increase that hardness value I was getting a little bit of blurring and I don't really want that so I'm just going to increase the hardness and now coming back down to this layer if we take a look at the pattern masking this will be good so this is just going to mask a few of these shapes and then I have this range value and I can just increase this all the way up so that is going to give me this roughness information however what I want to do is change the blending mode for the rough Channel itself so in my drop down I'm going to Target my roughness Channel information and then here for normal my blending mode I'm going to switch this to subtract so let's just set this to the subtract option and now you can see that I'm combining that base in this base layer that base roughness information with this new roughness again that kind of snowflake glint that I'm going for so let's hit M on the keyboard to go back to my material mode so now when we take a look you can see that because of that roughness map that we added we're getting these nice little specular flakes here which really helps to sell this overall snow material and so now if I go in and just kind of move my light around again you can see how that roughness map is affecting the overall lighting so that's going to complete this basic snow material so with just a few layers you can see that we can get a nice snow because I placed everything into this folder grouping all the layers we can always right click and save this as a smart material so that I can use that in other projects so now I need to create a mask for my snow layer I'm going to create a black mask let's add a generator and for the generator I'm going to choose the ambient occlusion generator and start to play around with the parameters so let's increase this contrast setting and now I have this Global balance and this is giving me the exact effect that I want I have this effect of snow building up on top of the surface and I can use this Global balance slider as a parameter that I can use to kind of dial this effect up and down so pretty cool this is exactly what I'm kind of looking for here now one of the things that I want to do here in this case is this particular generator is using my image input for the ambient occlusion that's coming straight from the bake however as you recall earlier we were able to use a combination of the ambient occlusion coming from this stump material and combining that with the bake and then I was able to you know fix a couple of the issues however in the layer stack is where I have this combined ambient occlusion and I want to use that and that is particularly why I went and anchored that information so what I can do is come over here to ambient occlusion let's go to Anchor points and then choose this scan fix so now that I've done that I just need to tell the system what channel I'm trying to reference from this layer and in the drop down we're going to choose ambient occlusion so now that I have that in place you'll notice that we get a little bit more detail and this is going to be pretty good this is what I'm kind of looking for however I feel like it might be just a little bit too noisy in my case so one of the things that I can do it's come back here to this stump layer which is that stump material from that sbsar and I can just blur the ambient occlusion information so to do that we are going to add a filter let's add a blur and I'm going to enable just the ambient occlusion information and then set a values so let me do something pretty small like uh 0.125 so I'm getting just some of the information just kind of breaking things up but it's it's not you know here it is it's a little too noisy but maybe we just dial this you know blur that slightly here so like I said I'll just leave it at this point one one okay so that is going to take care of that first layer of masking so the next thing I want to do though is I want to break this into kind of zones like I want to have like some buildup of snow on the ground and have a little bit of a different build up here on the top so let's think about this first layer and what I'm going to do is come over to my masks Let's uh my effects and let's add another generator and this time I am going to add the position generator so we'll grab this position generator and here let's alt left click the mask so we can see what's happening in this case I'm going to increase my contrast quite a bit and I'm going to enable the invert so now we have the mask basically targeting the ground coverage or the ground area and now you can see that I can kind of play around with this a little bit so that is what we're going to do here with this position okay so and we may go in and play with this a little bit more once we get it dialed in but for now this is kind of the base I want to work with and then I'm going to set the blending mode to multiply and then let's hit M on the keyboard to go back to our material and so now you can see that this is what we get okay so now it's just a matter of playing around with things so I'm going to increase my build up and my overall kind of contrast here so get something like that and I have a little bit of this fall off uh it's it's it's too uniform it's not really the exact effect that I want so I'm going to show you something kind of cool about this position generator so here there's an option to use a texture so I'm going to enable this option and then we have the ability to search for a texture input and if I go in here I think I'm going to use this clouds 2 again like I said I use this a lot so let's just drag and drop clouds 2 into the texture input you'll notice that nothing happened and that's because under the texture options I need to increase the texture opacity so now as you can see as I start to increase this textural opacity it is starting to kind of break things up a bit and now it's just a matter of going in see I can adjust my scale and now it's a matter of going in and just trying to get this uh in in inside uh you know some parameters adjusted the way that I want here so I'm breaking this up I can go back here to the overall Global balance and just kind of push this upward words now just over crank it a little bit because we're now breaking this kind of snow layer up with this texture input super powerful way to work with this tool I use it quite a bit so here let's increase our contrast maybe and maybe now I can play with the scale a little bit let's see uh I don't think so let's just leave it back at this value I had 1.14 which looks pretty good so with just that little bit of a change we now get a little bit more of a variation here in that overall kind of fall off and and I like that that looks pretty good and I think that's going to cover kind of my base ground here so now let's take a look at the top so what I'm going to do is just select this layer Ctrl D we'll just duplicate it and here we'll call this snow top and let's just go through and make changes again here so if we turn off the position slider we have just that ambient occlusion so that looks pretty good already and now we have our position let's come over to the position slider and this time let's turn off the global invert so we don't want to do that and now we have the snow on the top and let's just see it should be hopefully just a matter of me going in and just playing around with the global balance so let's see what I can get with this so we can go in and play with that contrast so not too much just enough and let's just see what we can do here so that's looking kind of interesting here and again we're using that texture input to help Drive some of these settings let's see what we can do with the overall pattern so if I adjust the the scale of the noise what does that do so you can see yeah that's just breaking things up we can play with the disorder a little bit if we want to just try to get that to break up a little bit in a different way just by changing that disorder we have our balance of course so we can play with that yeah that looks pretty interesting so let's go with something like that okay so there we go we have the snow kind of falling on the top and coming down the side here a little bit looks kind of interesting and so with this in place we now pretty much just have our snow scene and like I said it's always a matter of going in and just kind of tweaking things so I could play around with this kind of contrast I can play with the overall kind of balance here it's something like that and then again it's about playing with this uh this balance setting here even if I want to just push this up and down let's see maybe what I want to do is just something that looks a little bit more like that okay so that yeah I like it just a little bit more off center so it's not covering the entire top just a little bit over here on this side and then of course uh once we kind of get this brought into position here uh let's see we can play with that that overall kind of contrast but if we have an issue of something like we don't like like maybe I don't like this little snow here no problem we can always just grab a paint and go in and just kind of paint this out so I'll hit the X key to invert my paint value and then look I can go and just paint that out so say I didn't like that or at this point now we've kind of driven this procedurally I could just go in and start just kind of painting in additional details to this anywhere I want so if I wanted to like put some snow around the corners or you know anything you want of course you wouldn't just use a a round brush we would you know use a brush that has a little bit more of a grunge map to it but overall this is going to take care of my little scene here and what I want to work with so at this point we have our snow but it doesn't quite look like snow and to fix that we are going to add some subsurface scattering so first thing I'm going to do is jump over to my texture set settings and in my channels I am going to add a scattering channel so now I have this scattering Channel let's jump back over to our layers and I am going to add a new fill layer and at the top here I will just call this scattering and for the material I'm going to enable only the scattering Channel and now I have this slider which lets me just dial in some scattering information so if I set this to a value of 1 you'll notice that nothing is actually happening so what we need to do is check our Shader and by default I do believe that subsurface scattering is enabled so what you need to do is jump over to your display settings and you need to activate subsurface scattering in the display so once I turn that on now you can see that we are getting this sub surface scattering effect and we can increase the sample count if we like if you see a lot of noise here so I might just bump this up a little bit okay so now that it's on and I can see it the next thing I need to do is maybe take a look at my actual scale value so here it's just set this default 0.5 so I'm going to just decrease the scale value and let's set it to something around maybe .04 okay so just you know zooming around taking a look at the object uh well actually let me take a look at this I think actually setting this to .01 will be correct so now we're starting to actually see what looks like snow here in substance painter so this is really starting to come together and look a lot more like snow now we like I said we have our scattering Channel and and we can decrease or increase this value here to change the intensity value of this scattering effect now I only want this scattering to affect the snow area so what I'm going to do in this case is come over to my scattering layer let's create a black mask and then I am going to create a fill now I need to be able to reference some type of mask that it represents my snow and to do that we can just jump back to our snow layers so for example here if I just alt left click on snow top that's going to give me this exact mask that I want and so notice here that I'm choosing or I'm viewing the mask that's part of my layer group so with that in place all I need to do do here is just add an anchor point at the top so that's my snow top mask and that's going to work for what I need let's do the same thing for snow so if we go to our snow layer group you can see in the layer mask that is the mask for the bottom or the ground cover area perfect for what I need so let's add an effect and an anchor Point here as well so now I have my two masks then we can just simply come over here to my fill let's come to the grayscale input anchor points and let's grab our snow mask I'm going to hit Ctrl D to duplicate that and then do the same thing let's grab snow top mask so now that I have these two masks I can simply just come over here and add or set this to Max lighten and now I have built in my scattering mask the mask that I need so if I hit M on the keyboard to go back to my material mode now we have subsurface that's that is now affecting just my snow layer and again if we get in really close you can see the overall effect of what I have here it looks really really good now at this point too I could jump over here to my display settings I'll activate my temporal anti-aliasing and let's see where are my Shadows up here towards the top I can enable my Shadows if I want to kind of help view this in the 3D View and here is my scene with my snow this is all ready to be exported you can export your maps for rendering in any 3D program or you can just send this right into Stager if you're using Stager for your rendering and here you can see a final render that was done using substance Stager and then I added some post effects and color grading in Photoshop so that'll conclude this video on using substance painter to create a custom snow material to enhance our 3D capture thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Wes McDermott

Views: 12,627

Keywords: adobe, masking, materials, photogrammetry, snow, stump, substance3d, substancepainter, tree

Id: bMPFdRTTpFE

Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023