How to Import 3D Models into Substance Painter

hey everyone today we're going to go through the process of how to export our models from maya and how to set them up in substance painter for texturing here are the key things i will cover in this tutorial material assignment in maya and how they impact texture sets in substance painter exporting our models for maya setting up our project and substance painter baking mesh maps in substance painter and setting up our texture sets with layers masks and material instancing for texturing feel free to use the timestamps to jump to wherever you need to in this video so with that let's get started alright so here we are in maya as you can see we have our completed hammer boy concept in character and we now want to take him into substance painter for texturing so the first thing that we need to look at is our uvs in the previous tutorial i went through the entire process of how to unwrap the character and you can see that i have this broken up by uv sets here so i have the character group i have the hair i have the clothing just so you can see that kind of how it's broken up and then i have kind of the goggles and the hammer on one uv set so i have four total uvs uh and texture maps that will be used to texture this entire character now when going into substance painter substance painter does not care about any of this structuring here what substance painter does care about is the materials now if i take a look at all of these materials what substance painter will do is essentially create a texture set for each one of these materials so you can see here's one for my shirt my shorts my gloves leather and everything that's on the hammer and it would just turn into a huge mess and the more materials that you have the more extra sets you're going to have which is not what we want in this case what we want right now is to set up our texture sets essentially by these groups so what i would typically do is save right where i'm at here with all this material application so that i have it and i can reference that later and then we're going to assign materials to these groups here so if i open up this group i can select the character body hold right click and assign favorite material and i'm just going to do fong okay it really doesn't matter because all that really matters is the the the color information okay and i'm gonna set this to a distinct color and this will be red okay next thing i'm gonna do is grab my hair select all my objects in this group and i'm going to hold right click again and assign favorite material and i will do another fong and then this will be the next material set and i can change this to maybe a blue okay now don't worry none of this is going to carry over we're just doing this to differentiate between the two and then finally i'm going to select my clothing group and you can see all the different clothing here and i'll go ahead and assign material and set this to green okay there we go so i for now hide my goggles and hammer as we don't need that we won't be texturing that or setting that up right now and you can see everything set up and it's going to combine and create our texture sets based off of these colors and materials now what we want to make sure we do is to go back here to our hypershade and select those materials that we just created and you can see that we want to name this because substance painter will take the name of this material so i will call this skin or i'll call it body because this is the the main body body base okay the next one i'll take is just hair and then the clothing will be just or green will just be clothing or clothes probably for shorter okay with all of our materials assigned the last thing that you want to do is just do a final check on your uvs so if i open up my uv go to uv editor and check i see that everything's looking good there's no overlapping uvs there's no floating uvs in this tutorial we will not be using what's called udims so we won't be using any textures that are kind of on the next coordinate system okay so with that in mind you do want to check your uv sets and make sure that you only have one map here okay it may not you may not be sure why but just that's essentially the uv channel and since we're not using udims we don't really care about that right now and a good viewer here is uv uv set editor and you can see that i only have map one which is perfect okay so that'll make sure things are nice and clean as they're going in and again doing one final pass making sure that our uvs are nicely unfolded packed laid out the way that they need to be you also want to organize them in a way that makes sense so i wouldn't have like half of the shorts down here and the other half in the corner and the shirt all spread out right so just make sure to organize your uvs in a way that makes sense make it your life easier when you're texturing okay so with that now i can just select my character main here and go to file export okay now i'm going to go ahead and open this or save this out here in a folder and we move this back to the main screen we have exports here and i just made a folder all i did just in my maya project just maya modeling substance and then exports and i want to change this to fbx okay and if i find fbx here you see it's right there all right and i will call this you know character export and we will just use the default autodesk media entertainment and export selection and let it do its thing okay and that's it so once we made sure we verified everything is working the way that we want and looks the way that we want we can now jump to substance painter alright so let's go ahead and open up substance painter here so i am using substance painter 20 20.2 but you'll still be able to follow along even if you're using earlier versions so go to file new and we're just going to run through these settings here real quick so the template is going to be pbr we want to make sure that we stick with just ppr metallic roughness you can see that there's a whole bunch of them here and we just want the algorithmic basically this is just the default pbr which is again it's just physically based render and that'll give us exactly what we need okay then we want file so go ahead and select file and we can see that we have our character export here that i exported into our exports folder so go ahead and hit open and document resolution i want to set this to 2k and we definitely have the capability of exporting larger resolutions but for our working resolution 2k should be fine if you have lower powered gpu i would suggest dropping this to 1k or probably not 512 but but most recent cards and gpus should be fine normal map resolution can stay at directx and we can disable compute tangent space perfect per fragment and this may be enabled by default so what you want to do is just disable used uv tile workflow this is that udims workflow that i was talking about which we're not going to need and then disable cameras and auto unwrap since we already have our characters unwrapped and we don't need any cameras so go ahead and hit okay all right and there he is so here's our hammer boy you can see that we have a 3d view and if you just hold alt here in the left 3d viewport you can see you have all of the camera control camera controls and these are thankfully just like maya so alt left click to rotate around or orbit around alt middle mouse to pan and then alt right click to zoom and then on the right panel here you can see if i hold alt and middle mouse drag again same thing this is now just our 2d uv editor okay and we can texture things here use stencils paint um sometimes you know some people only want to paint in 3d and won't need this but we'll keep these open here down at the bottom these are all our assets which contains all of our alphas brushes effects materials and what's called smart materials which we'll be getting into later over here to the right we have layers so these behave if you've used photoshop before as our as uh your regular layering system anything on top will be um the active layer or the most visible layer and then we can change some things with masks and blending which again we'll we'll do as we move through now here we are with texture set list you see body base clothes and hair these are the three that i exported from maya here so if we see we jump back to maya real quick these are all based off of these materials these three materials that i created for body base clothes and then hair okay and if i brought in them as the default materials that i had set up you can imagine that i would have all sorts of texture set lists and what this does is that it allows all of my uvs and textures that i had packed within each group to be packed within each texture set okay now in some instances you may want to have separate maps like if i wanted to break out the boots and gloves onto a separate texture set you absolutely can and then you can composite that later unfortunately as of recording this video now there is no way to collapse layers on export so you have to use custom scripts or you have to use substance designer this way we'll have we'll be able to implement some techniques that allow us to have complete control over layering and masking so it doesn't matter if i have multiple objects combined as long as they are not overlapping we'll be good to go all right here is our properties paint so this is just our brush settings our fill fill layers and and all that good stuff material properties so we'll get into that once we get into painting and then if i actually move this texture set settings up here are the texture settings um within the within the project now now that we've kind of done a quick high level overview and we have our project our model imported into our project the very first step that you always always want to do is to go to texture set settings scroll down and find bake mesh maps so take a look at our character here and if i do bake mesh maps you'll see what kind of pops up these are all of our pbr textures you can see we have normal for normal map world space normal we have material ids ambient occlusion curvature position thickness all of these all of these are used within substance and if you don't bake these then you're going to be missing out on a ton of procedural benefits and generators smart masks smart materials all of those rely on these so just make sure to always come in and the first thing that you can do is set these to a high resolution again if you're working on a lower end machine maybe stick with 512 i'll just go ahead and set these now to 2048 and i'll go ahead now with all of these enabled bake selected textures and you can see it's making its way through and it's doing it based by the texture sets so i'll go ahead and pause and let this go through okay and it's done so it went through and baked out uh 21 so seven maps for each texture set and everything worked out fine and we can go ahead and hit okay now under bake mesh maps we will actually be looking at baking our normal map here with uh you know and maybe ambient occlusion with using a different mesh or using a high poly mesh so you can use high definition meshes so we can actually go through and export our models for maya with subdies and subdivision and bake that detail down for now we're fine as is so i will go ahead and just close this now and we can see that we have our our character and you can see he's got some a lot more detail that detail is coming from ambient occlusion and normal and curvature maps and all of that okay so now that we have that we can go ahead and start building our masks okay so i know right now if i go ahead and let's say for example i grab maybe this what do we got leather rough or maybe we'll just grab a simple leather medium grain here okay and i'm gonna just drag that left click and bring that over here and you can see it applied that leather material to everything i clearly don't want that and i only want this to be applied to my gloves and my boots so what can we do here is so i can hit q to kind of get out of here i don't want to mess with any of the uvs all i'm using these materials right now for you guys is just placeholder i am using these to set up my masks so i'm going to create a folder i'm going to call one called gloves all right now i'm going to drop my leather in here and with gloves now i can select this layer right click and add what's called a black mask now what a black mask do will do in typical digital r is anything that's black will be a 100 invisible and gone you will not be able to see it and anything that is white so if i right click that and do add white mask you can see that now it's i can see everything so that's what white and black do here so we'll keep this as black mask then the key thing now is make sure you're selected here and you see the blue rectangle around our mask slot okay and now that i have that i want to go over here to the left and select polygon fill okay now once you get polygon fill you see that our properties over here change and it's from white to black i'm going to leave this at white and now anything that i add here you can see if i go ahead now and start to click and drag it's starting to add that into that mask here okay so this is great but i really don't want to manually select a bunch of polygons like this so i'll undo that and here we have triangle polygon and mesh so as you can imagine we want mesh so i can select mesh boom look at that the entire glove has be it will now appear as a white um mask in our mask here so if i go ahead now and click the straps and i can go here now and do the straps on the right side of the character and there we go and you see sometimes it takes a second to update but we're good to go so you can see our mask now has the gloves as white and it's applying this leather medium grain so the next thing i want to do is if i go ahead and create a new one and let's just make a new one called shirt and we're going to do the same thing right click add a black mask and then i can go to polygon fill and what i want to do is select the shirt now i need to make sure that i have something here you can see that i'm just gonna grab maybe just some generic fabric okay so maybe i just grab just fabric rough it really doesn't matter right now i just need to see it show up so there's fabric rough that looks good and you can see i added my shirt and it's only applying to the shirt so let's do that again now we're going to do that with shorts okay so the shorts are can be an another material and i will do probably fine sure fabric or maybe fabric soft denim okay and i'm just grabbing these from the material slot here and again you can see all right whoops i didn't set my mask no problem add a black mask go to polygon fill here and select mesh fill and make sure that your color is set to white and then i can select those shorts and there we are okay so we can kind of see how those are uh appearing there so that looks fine and now again we're just using these as placeholders i want to do the shoes okay so what i want to do for the shoes is i will go ahead and make a new folder i should call them boots to stay consistent and if i let's say i just grab again let's find that leather but i'm like you know what this is going to be made of the same material as these gloves what i want to do is let's create that mask so add black mask enable your mask here make sure we're set to white mesh fill and let's just click these here now you can't see it because there's no material but what i want to do is go to gloves grab this layer here right click copy layers okay go back to boots and you can see that it updated with the masks right click again and what we want to do is paste layer as instance okay now i want to make sure that is inside my boots layer and there we are look at that so i'm now using the same material property so what that means is let's say i go down here and i want a darker brown leather there you go we can have a darker brown leather i want to go to the you know and change the scaling on this i can i say you know tile it may be five or ten times maybe we'll just do five for now and then move on great so again these are all all i'm doing right now is just setting up my layers and masks and so i can move forward and you can see like i can go to maybe my shorts here and i can make those kind of that lighter material here a little bit more color and again i'm just in the properties area here and we can change the uvs a bit if we want to tile that maybe 10 times so it doesn't look like it's too too large right you can see how large these fabrics these are tiny very small stitched fabric okay so if i go now to the shirt i can select the fabric rough and just tile the scale maybe ten by ten if that's a little bit too much maybe six so we can see a little bit because it is a rough fabric okay and i'm fine i'm not going to worry about anything but you know what i forgot i want to make sure that my collar is also set so i can go ahead now create a new folder move that to the top and we can call that collar then in this collar here we can make sure that we set a new fabric material and fabric rough but this time he won't be an instance and do that oops i accidentally grabbed that one so i'll grab fabric rough here and i'll drop that there okay all right and i will just simply add a black mask and add this here in this case i would say i can show you now we can use this checkerboard which is uv fill so now i can select it by uvs and i can change this so it's a little bit more obvious and it's kind of that light tanned color and maybe we can eye drop it and let's say i like this here if you click and hold this should be fine here and that's that's fine and then we can just tile this uh eight eight or six times or something like that all right so that's fine we just want this as a placeholder okay and now that we've done that we just want to make sure to do that with the rest of the character and in this case i can trash this one and trash this layer and i have everything set up here okay so if you want to add a description you certainly can but because i named things i mean it should be you know maybe a little bit more descriptive i can do skin and eyes all right so what i'm gonna do now is set up um these types of layers here that i just did for the main character i'm gonna do that on the body base and separate out the eyes into their own and i'm going to do the same thing for the hair because i have the hair eyebrows and eyelashes all all together on one map so i want to separate those out so i'll go ahead just pause the video real quick and do that okay so here we are i have everything set up broken out with masks and we can start texturing this guy and getting into more details in the in the next tutorial all right so the same i've done the same thing here so you can see that if i go to body base that i broke up you know the pupils the eyes the skin as different folders with different masks and for the hair same thing i just broke up the hair the eyebrows the lashes and you know i just maybe did a couple of um simple things here for the hair where i just instead of giving it kind of a pre-made material or smart material or something like that for the hair i just literally just did a layer with a fill color uh to get something like this okay but again we're gonna get into a lot of the texturing the basics of texturing and substance painter and really get a stylized looking character by the end of this all right so again all of these are just placeholders the skin is also just using the simple skin material let me see if i jump to body base and you can see skin it's just using this skin human simple so there's a lot of work that needs to be done on the face we're going to just paint that and make it look a lot more lively and kind of cover the concepts of painting skin really and using the the smart materials so um everything set up and ready for us to get into deep texturing so hopefully you guys found this helpful as always if you have any questions or comments um let me know down below and i will do my best to respond and update and like and subscribe is always appreciated so thanks again everyone hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial and we'll just keep moving along thanks take care everyone

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 13,302

Rating: 4.9317408 out of 5

Keywords: maya, 3d art, autodesk, tutorial, export, 3d model, substance painter, adobe, allegorithmic, workflow, import, how to

Id: zASPStN4Hl4

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020