How to make SKIN TEXTURES in Substance Painter

hey i'm jay and in today's video we're gonna be talking about texturing skin and substance painter [Music] starting with the model and the normal map we made in the last video in this video we're gonna make the skin textures step one reference all right cool so what we're gonna do is here's my screen this is my reference and we're gonna talk a little bit about it but this is kind of a general you can see from a bird's eye view what's going on in terms of skin tone and details i'm kind of aiming at this area i like the idea of maybe like a mixed ethnicity or one that's a little bit more difficult to pin down a little bit more subjective i think that's interesting love the freckles here so this might be a nice addition and a fun thing to show and yeah generally um uh you know middle skin tone not too light not too dark all right so that's what we're aiming at here i got some makeup here but we probably won't be doing any of this in this kind of video today we're going to be texturing in substance painter we're going to make a base color and then if time permits maybe we'll make a quick little roughness map too two really important kinds of imagery that are extremely important as reference for base color maps in particular is rbx imaging and cross polarized photographs so rbx imaging actually was first tipped off about this by magdalena or at intervene on twitter she's another character artist this was a great tip that she gave a long time ago this is used in other industries both of these is actually used in cg a lot but rbx is used in other industries for i think skin purposes honestly but look how cool look what's going on here this is even crisper one but look how cool we've actually separated if you look here this red channel and then this kind of brown color are different these are not the same so this is different details and you'll see once we're in substance painter how this is really useful because we're going to be layering effects so essentially we have two images here that we can see like separated on most channels of really crunched uh and sharpened detail that's beneath the skin we can see around the left so obviously this is with subsurface scattering and all that fancy stuff so this is sun damage and stuff this is like freckles and sunspots if you didn't if you didn't have anything covering it so you can see here the the mole these things would be freckles right and so when we see him you can see here's that mole and here's some very light freckling this light brown stuff so you can actually just see it straight up reason why this is super beneficial is the patterns kind of a noise right and this is like the blood so we see the splotchiness we see lots of noise uh we see kind of veiny type shapes maybe great reference and then cross polarized photography texture xyz actually you sells packs that you can just purchase that you can use either for you can actually just project textures on which is really common or what we're doing right now we're using it as reference and what cross-polarized photography is is essentially photographs using filters to remove reflected light so it's like not having a spec channel so you're essentially seeing a real-life base color map which is obviously the best reference right off the top just you know obviously you came to this video this is painting skin in substance painter you might be asking the question why would you paint skin in substance painter you know you could use mari you could use all kinds of different photogrammetry and different techniques uh it really depends on your end goal what i'm doing for this demo project is very much what i do in my personal work and even professional work so we're hand making everything we're kind of curating it it's going to lend itself to somewhat of a style we're not we're not trying to replicate photography one-to-one really but also it's a great exercise it's a great tutorial kind of thing or a practice to do if you want to get better at painting complicated organic things in substance painter this kind of technique is going to help you if you were to make creatures and aliens and things that don't exist it helps to kind of understand skin a little bit and making base color maps and how it mixes together and ultimately i think it produces a pretty cool result i don't know what it's going to look like now we're going to we're going to find our way during the process but i find it generally satisfying to make the maps it's kind of the old school way i guess you might say but again i feel like it gives you also creatively and artistically it gives you the most control right out of the gate because you are making every element right you're not taking a photograph and repurposing it um so there is some pros and cons there but the methods do produce different results so you just got to ask yourself what your end goal is for your project and then choose what's best so right now we're going to be painting a base color in substance painter let's jump into substance painter now and talk about how we can set up the scene with our models we made in the previous video and we can get ourselves ready to do texturing all right so here we are in substance now we need to do is we need to load in our model and set up the parameters of the scene and then get going with starting to set up our scene to do some painting so first things first we need to go file new then we're going to choose a template pbr metal rough will work fine this is in the starter assets so everyone has this super basic and this will be fine this is like the most basic template we can use next we gotta choose our file so we're gonna choose our model in our case we exported this from zbrush we used hd geometry and when we use hd geometry we exported the normal map at 8k in our case which got us all the deets and we're going to bring that in in a second so it's a little bit of a different workflow than if you were baking a high to low but here we are i exported my subdivision level 4 right here in zbrush so i actually just isolated the part that i'm going to do the demo on you can see if we zoom in this is the resolution that we're at so this is the highest resolution i have without going into hd when i did export it i made sure smooth normals is on it should be on by default and that's really it i just export it as an fbx and then i can load it into substance painter so here it is right here and then we just got to choose the document resolution we'll make it 4k that's as big as it goes right now i think and then a little awkward tidbit is for me i think i need to change the normal map format to opengl you can change this later don't be too scared of this j this is just the green channel in the normal map direction is it up or is it down and i did a test before and it seems like it was flipped so it depends on your export settings from zbrush if you're bringing normal map in from any other program i just got to be sure what orientation the green channel is all right we'll hit ok and now we are going to load our scene boom here we go she's in all right i'll just save this right off the top let's just save our scene all right let's take out the pen start doing some artsy stuff at least starting to prep it what we'll do now is bring in our map and start to set up the scene to do our painting so we can do a couple things either when we started here uh in our project configuration we could have loaded uh the normal map right when we set up the scene or we can just hit plus right now and then add resources and then we can go to wherever we have our normal maps so i'm just going to click the normal map and choose this and then this is a texture and then i can just keep it in this project don't need you know you have current session which would end if i close it and then library obviously for everything else which we don't need so just adding it to this project there it is i can just drag it over there so now we have our 8k normal map uh this is all the detail that we sculpted in zbrush and we didn't do any baking it's just right there right because we export it from zbrush so again a little bit of a different workflow because now we're going to generate some maps from this so i'll come over here to the baking right now why don't we just start with the curvature map to make sure things are working we can go to 2k for now well we can just go to 4k this shouldn't take too long so in the curvature settings here you can see it's on generate from mesh which is really nice and high quality if you're doing that but we're not baking a high to a low the normal workflow or the typical workflow would be in the common settings you'd be adding meshes right here you'd like load the high poly you'd have a bunch of meshes here right and then you would bake high to low using the cages and stuff like that but we're not doing that we already have the normal map so we're going to just derive the detail from the normal map right so i'll show you how that works with the curvature map okay so in the curvature settings instead of generating from mesh we'll go to generate from normal map details we'll leave it at 0.5 so this shouldn't be on obviously because brought in our normal map right it's loaded right here so it shouldn't be checked we'll hit bake and then here it's going to do its thing so now it's generating a curvature map from our normal map so if we come in here we just check the um curvature channel here it is it doesn't look great i know um but it'll it'll be okay we're just going to be using it for some chatter some people over value like cavity maps and stuff i'm not too worried about it we're just getting some details so let's jump back out of here and maybe we can generate some more things let's see what happens we might not use world normal map i mean occlusion might not look that good but that's okay no it looks pretty good actually it's cool that it's making this from the normal map it used to always do this but now you can generate ambient occlusion maps and curvature maps from the geo which is better and you might be asking now why are you doing this uh well it's in case we wanted to use certain generators we might not be though so this could be useless which is fine it doesn't take that long to bake you know it's almost done baking now and i'll just save the scene and i'll have these maps so with all these maps so you know if you wanted to do a top-down gradient if you want to do certain like dirt and whatever here we go curvature position map thickness which might help sometimes i use the thickness map when i'm making skin you can see it kind of highlights things nicely on our normal apps obviously so there you go let us save this scene and then we'll start setting up the paint okay i'm gonna do just some general really quick stuff here um this focal length is killing me so why don't we just do something like this all right so first thing let's delete this basic thing and we'll start with a fill layer and we'll just call this base color why not so what we're going to do is we're going to have these layers in substance right and we're going to layer them from top to bottom or from bottom to top in this case as if we were kind of airbrushing or painting up layers of skin and we'll we'll jump around we'll keep things non-destructive that's the beauty of using substance painter rather than some other straightforward things so if it makes sense we can separate brush strokes we can always change color and we're just going to kind of layer detail as it goes so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start relatively warm you know we want to make that bloody layer we kind of saw some of the rbx imaging might help us while we make the detail portion of that but we'll start with a very warm color and then we'll lay our detail up on top i think what makes a good base color is a variety of subtle differences subtle differences in shape subtle differences in value subtle differences in color and then also a mix of soft edges and sharpness is something that i think having sharp detail is something i think that does make renders and skin look like nice and believable contrast really is what we're talking about right like some things are soft some things are sharp some things are this color some things are that color but the difference in what makes skin skin is that when we're done it'll look relatively even you know you'll have these big general like maybe the the eyes are darker it's just big gradients but as you zoom in there's going to be differences but they're they're not going to have a lot of contrast because that would create all this busy noise so it's going to be subtlety and organic shapes we want to add all kinds of imperfections to help it feel believable so let's start making colors if you hold alt and just click that you can just do straight up color so why don't we just do this also since this is the base you know we can just get a little bit of roughness here okay so now we can continue adjusting our colors if we want and first what we're trying to do is make a lighter red blood kind of color as our base here and then we're going to add our first fill layer and that'll be our darker red color and so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to try to create this complicated shapes in our base colors here that we can layer in on top so once we make our fill layer we'll create a black mask and in that black mask we can create a fill and then in that fill we can put whatever textures we want so if we go down to our library and we search for noise in our textures we can see all the different options we have so we can pick one and just drag that into the channel on the left and then we can start playing with the parameters so this is where you should just have fun and experiment what we're going to do is mix several so once we get something that we generally like that's nice and noisy i probably like to start out big and blobby first get some interesting shapes then we'll get smaller and more refined over time we can then add another fill layer and look for a different kind of noise and definitely we want to have some kind of contrast in the scale between these two noises so maybe we make smaller noise and then we can start mixing these together in our mask by changing the blend mode of our next fill layer to screen which just like in photoshop is layering it up in terms of the light values and then we can start to play with these things together this is the beauty of substance this is the format i'm going to be doing over and over again is creating masks on fill layers sometimes creating masks on folders and then layering up different fills to make these complex masks where as you can see everything is live we can change the colors and roughness we can change the parameters in our masks we can add remove delete at any time so we want to stay organized because this can get messy and complicated fast we want to take it step by step and control it as much as we can before we get ahead of ourselves and we also want to leave ourselves like a few amount of tools to play with we don't want a ton of things where we just get swamped so after we make our base noise here to make the complicated shapes then we can add a paint layer to our mask and then we can start hand painting stuff in our case i want to add more veins you know i want to add veins on the eyelids and then on the nostril wings is a common place to find blood veins and so i'm just choosing a brush and using my cintiq i'm using my pressure sensitivity to vary the line thickness to vary the line pressure and i'm trying to create these organic shapes i'm doing it asymmetrically also and we can do this with all kinds of different effects by mixing hand-painted things with procedural things we're going to get very unique complex detail okay once we have our bloody red layer done we're going to add our next color and in this case it's going to be a purplish so we're starting to introduce some color contrast now i don't want to use the same colors or like a very few amount of colors we want a little bit of a variety even if it's subtle so that it doesn't feel flat and it feels more alive so we're gonna go with purple it's close to red and one of the most common places to use this is kind of around the under eye where the skin is thin and the blood is showing through i'm also gonna slightly put it around the mouth like where hair follicles might be and then we'll finally add our fill layer that's gonna be our skin color all right so to make our skin color we're gonna create a new fill layer now to be our skin and then we'll just choose a fleshy color again we can always change this later on so don't overthink this just going to choose a fleshy kind of color and then we're going to add a black mask and then we're going to add a paint layer on this mask so we're just going to do this all by hand to start with we can always adjust it so we're just going to first pick a brush that has some noise in it and you can have fun with this there's a bunch of different things you could do here i'm doing dirt 3 and i'm just going to start painting and varying my pressure varying my size and the goal here as with all of these layers is we're just creating complexity that's subtle different kinds of patterns different different kinds of sizes and opacity so that when they mix together they create an overall organic look so you can just have fun with this and just start spraying around i turned on symmetry in substance to save some time because you know you're not going to notice the pattern you might as well cut the time in half and then i can turn off symmetry to spend some time so there's no discernible patterns uh here i'm changing my brush to a different brush that has more noise so there's not really like a right or wrong answer i think variety is actually probably the most important thing so go ahead and switch things up but you can just spend time painting and that's it just going to spend some time layering this up and you'll see as you spend more and more time it starts to become more and more like flesh and we can always control the opacity of this paint layer if we need to you could also add a fill layer so that that can mix that's just a solid value if you wanted to mix a little bit so again really no right or wrong answer we're just trying to do something other than a straight fill here so that the it's irregular and it feels more organic when it's mixing with our layers below now with this setup and our skin painted nice and even to add redness and warmth we'll actually take away some of this skin color by painting black like on the nose or in the eyes you can also separate that with another paint layer in the mask if you want to keep it clean and tidy speaking of organization let's make a folder now called subdermis we'll put everything that we made for below the surface in that folder and then we're going to add another folder and we're going to call that dermis so here we are in the dermis right the dermal layer that would be the skin it's like the top layer well middle if you want to think of it that way because oil would be on top makeup would be on top so remember we're going bottom to top here we're organizing it like it would be in real life so adding the folders by the way and adding more and more layers is going to make the scene heavier it's going to make it more expensive things are going to be slower so we might get to that point later on well you'll see like i'll just end up turning off a lot of layers so that it's faster but for right now we want to add the sun damage the imperfections that we can get the great reference from these rbx images so let's see if we can start to make something like that we're gonna go really heavy-handed in the beginning it's kind of really dark burnt orange all right so now let's add some stuff why don't we first add some noise first do a nice nice gentle noise how about this one so we'll do another one we do another uh technique here so we got the noise right so now i'm going to add a fill and then uh we could add clouds we could use all kinds of stuff but now i'm going to add this one and now what i'm going to do with this is i'm going to set it to multiply so what we've done now is remove some so by having something and then removing and then adding and then you know now we're creating complexity again by doing relatively simple things so maybe clouds would be better actually for this one yeah i think this would be better yeah all right so we got this now we're going to add smaller stuff all right i'm going to drag a new texture into our new fill layer and i'm switching the projection mode to try planar projection that just means it's not using the uvs and this keeps patterns more uniform because it's not distorted by the uvs i'll change this fill layer to screen mode too so it starts to mix with everything below and we'll play with the size and adjust it there with the contrast to see it all mixed together now i really like the dirt 3 pattern i felt like it was really organic and made for good like freckling and stuff so i'm gonna add another fill layer here it's a little bit greedy but we're gonna try to go for four now i'm gonna set this to screen mode two what i'm gonna do with this one the plan here is to just make it very large so we're getting like splotches like big old sunspots you can always adjust like the rotation and offset and scale of these fill layers so if you get like an awkward shape somewhere you can always adjust it that way too now that i have all these layers and i have it the screen mode i have the different blend modes i can play with the opacity to kind of like adjust the mix and then the ultimate control is i'll add a paint layer now you could just add a paint layer and straight up just paint right like add and remove but in this case what i'm going to try to do is i'm going to try to just edit what we have so far so i really only want to remove so by changing our new paint layer to multiply that means that it's only adding black so as i paint and i switch from black and white i'm just removing parts of the mask that i don't like parts of the shapes or by painting white i'm bringing it back so it's not a straight painting i'm really just editing the mask that we've built so far and i can always add a paint layer on top if i want to do something custom like if i want to add a spot or a mole like in an exact spot so again splitting all these things out for the mass gives you ultimate control and you can really go to town with this but not trying to get too complicated this is just some examples of what you can do to create complex masks all right now let's add a new fill layer freckles we're gonna make some freckles here uh not gonna be applicable to every character in the world although you could use them on a wide range of characters honestly just make them very subtle ours though we definitely it to feel like there's freckles on the upper nose upper cheek region noticed in some of our reference and i think it's a cool detail to add and show here in the video so just making a new fill layer and then starting off with a paint layer on our mask and then just choosing a brush with dots i just typed in dots i'm using a trusty old kyle's brushes over here just so we don't have to make one of our own but we can show that later on in the video so just spraying down some dots easy peasy so i can just put down some stuff if i want to erase it obviously you know the drill now just by painting black and white you're editing the mask here i also try to play around with the dots brush which is a different brush and varying my pen pressure i can also play with opacity so we're already getting something pretty complex but everything is like perfect circles that's not what freckles look like we're trying to be organic so we're going to start using some more filters here to show you so i'm using blur now as the first filter that's gonna help us get rid of those super sharp edges freckles are below the skin too at different depths so that helps to make it feel like it is deep and we're just seeing them through the skin and then another filter we're gonna use is warp warp is one that you can use to break up patterns you'll see once i choose it out of the gate it's going to really like break it apart but the key to using it to just subtly break up patterns that are perfect is to use the blur in the source parameters of the warp this blurs the actual warp itself so it's not so chattery so by playing with intensity and the blur you can just break it up as much as you want so we're just avoiding perfect round circles and we're avoiding sharp edges so it helps to make it organic and we're painting very subtle brush strokes but we're getting some more complicated results as it filters up we can even paint as we have the filters on so we can add or remove add more dots based on your machine based on how many layers there are in your scene this could be slow if you have like a lot of layers and a lot of filters on something but it is something cool that you can do to kind of see real-time feedback with real-time effects going on your strokes so this is the technique i use to achieve the freckles all right now let's talk about another kind of detail that we can put in the base color map actually multiple maps but it's a good channel to have in your textures and that's blackheads or clogged pores generally anything that uses cavities so let's do that right now we're going to create a new fill layer and we'll just name it blackheads in our case and then we'll do the same drill we'll make a black mask then we'll create a generator this time not just a fill layer which create a generator and then we'll go over to our generators and we'll choose curvature this is how we can use our cavities so in the curvature generator settings you can see i can choose cavities as my input source and you can even have it be unfiltered so it's straight up the cavity that we baked so that's what's driving our mask now now what we want to do is only kind of bring out some blackheads right we just want to like with our brush paint here and there and some pores and have it fill so we can do that similar to the techniques we did earlier what we're going to do is is we're going to fill a new paint layer with black which will be on multiply so that's going to take away everything because our generator is using the cavities as white so by having everything black you won't see anything at all we'll also use the first time the fill tool and we can choose the selection type so we can just select the mesh so in one click we can fill the whole mesh which is the whole mask in this case with black and then now we can paint black and white on our paint channel and by painting white we can add some of the poor detail that we have from the curvature map so that might sound convoluted hopefully you can follow along in the steps in the visuals too but i thought this is an interesting way to show the cavity generator to show the selection tool and the tricky ways that we can use blend layers to create the kinds of effects we want so with a relatively simple brush strokes now we are bringing in complicated detail and that's what you want you always want to do simple input complex output i didn't ultimately use a lot of the blackheads to be honest in mind it's very subtle but still i think useful techniques in here something too interesting that you should be aware of uh the benefit of doing things like this with fill layers is we could easily just turn on roughness in the channel of our fill layer and then we could also and spec and we could also affect all those separate texture maps with the single mask that we made right now and that's kind of the power of substance painter so you get all that detail in all your channels so even though it's subtle it breaks up the light and with very little work you created something that feels organic and complex all right now that we have multiple elements that are making up our texture here we have multiple fill layers and masks doing all kinds of things now to like iterate and work on the texture kind of bounce around so if i want to add more redness to the nose then i'm going to the skin color fill layer and i'm starting to remove some of it to reveal that subdermal layer that we have below if i want to increase the contrast in some of those shapes that is in the subdermal layer then i'll be bouncing down there and playing with the different fill colors there or increasing contrast and masks adding removing in masks you know just all kinds of stuff if i want to remove blackheads um if i want to have the the eyes be darker all kinds of different things that's why it's important to keep the scene relatively manageable and jump around it's not very linear you know for the sake of the demo of the video it might be focusing on topic to topic but this is more typical of how i'll be working you know i really want to sketch out the scope of my scene as quickly as possible like how many elements i need and then the majority of the time i'm going to be playing within those elements like just balancing changing aspects changing parameters and values and colors and stuff like that so this is really what most of the texturing looks like for me all right so texturing the lips what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna create a new folder for the lips then i can put any new fill layers or anything i want inside the new lips folder and we're just going to create a mask for the lips there so that we can play around inside the folder so as with everything i think what i'm going to do is i'm just going to block out the elements i think i need and then start playing with it based on my reference so why don't we do that first by just creating a fill layer call it base lips i'm going to just mask the folder and then i can do whatever i want on the inside of it so first start painting the mask so i'm gonna be heavy-handed at first but then the edge i need to feather off in some areas in some areas i'll be a little bit sharper but i kind of just believe that like making even basic things by hand this way like there's subtle variation you see what i'm saying by me using my own hand to make certain things that are layering and unlearning is just another variable it just adds complexity using uh my dumb hand is actually useful here which is part of the fun i think of making organic things is like just going along for the ride and just like you know the mistakes and everything is all part of it okay cool so that is the lips mask for right now base lips color and we also can do roughness and everything in here which is cool right but for color um lips a good thing to do is try to check the value against your skin is it brighter is it darker it's most likely darker saturation plays a role too so we're going to leave this for now so i want to see if i can get the edges of the lips i'm just noticing there's some discoloration around the corner of the lips edge of the lips and i want to get anytime i can derive something from the model to add complexity i like to do that so how we're going to do that is we're going to create a new fill layer for the outer edge and then we're going to create a mask and then what we're going to do is we're going to search for a thickness map that we derived earlier and drag that into the mask channel then what we can do is right click and create a levels and then we can start to play with the contrast so now we're using the model detail that we made to drive this so we're getting a complicated shape right out of the gate that we can then edit with painting if we want so here's the thickness map so it has information in it and i'm using that to do the discoloring so now i choose my darker value which is less saturated too so we're already getting like a two tonality see what i mean uh now looking at the cross polarized stuff with lips another interesting thing we could do is add lightness to the pads of the lips i think we could get even darker on the edges here actually so now we got different color temperatures too again subtle but it's gonna be doing something darkness and then let's do lightness why don't we and we'll do this for the pads again we already have the details so let's do that gonna do it again black mask fill we'll do a generator and we'll do the curvature again boom already interesting unprocessed okay boom so let's turn all this off this can be confusing fine okay there we go boom already interesting so maybe we do this a little bit and then maybe the sharp ones too a little bit again i can always paint this out right so can we do any fancy blending modes what about lightness or lighting okay cool cool and then we make it really subtle you can even do a global contrast and a global blur which is pretty cool add paint multiply let's just get rid of some of this so now i'll just lightly remove it everywhere around the edges especially and just maybe leave it towards the center pretty subtle off and on we've got detail in there i think that's what matters all right so i'm going to try to darken and up the saturation of the lips you can always rebalance the fillers that's what's good about it and then what i'm gonna do is on our new lightness layer i'll add a new paint layer and then i'll start to lighten the bottom inner lip i noticed it in some of my reference and i think it's a nice added bit of variety all right now the lips are done let's do a another final pass on our base color painting before we export this and take a look at it in a render so a couple more things i want to do now to add a little bit more detail in the base color is i want to first paint around the orbital bone here that you can see around the eye i want this to be more even and a little bit of a brighter yellower tone you can see this in some of the references but this happens because of the different layers underneath it's less blood here it's more bone or muscle and it's just a way to add more contrast in our base color that help it feel a little bit more natural so we're doing it on the eyebrows here in a little bit over the edge of the so we're doing it over the eyebrows here kind of around the whole orbital bone in general you might want to do it on the bottom of the chin as well or the skull so it's just a way again to add some contrast here so that it's not an even texture throughout the entire head but that we're showing that there is difference that there is different underlying tissue here and it helps to make it feel more believable also going to paint a little bit more detail around the eyelid itself could darken the upper eyelid but also have a little bit more sharp and strong along the edge of the eyelid as if it's like discolored red or pink where the eyelids actually are ending or they're meeting up and also on the inside where the tear duct is that would be a different color and material as well so i want to just account for that and again bring some more stronger contrast in these values and colors so by doing all this by the way i'm really just adding and removing in the mask of the skin color fill layer and if i need to go farther if i need something different i can always add another fill layer to change the color or add some element that i don't have but i'm trying to play with the elements that i do have as much as possible to keep the scene simple so really trying to stretch the complexity with what i'm doing rather than adding more and more things so continually jumping around between my elements of freckles and blackheads and sun damage layers and just painting in my paint layers to to continue refining the base color now before we take a look so i've spent some time now uh you know i'm generally happy with how it's looking but really to get a sense of like what next steps to take we need to export this and take a look at our renderer so let's talk about exporting these textures now so we can take a look okay so to actually export the textures we need to go to file export textures or shift command e bring up the export options first thing we got to do is select the output directory where the maps are going to go so do this and uh keep it there so put it in my case the project directory then the output template that's what we started with so you can see in the list of exports this is what it's going to export so we can make changes by going to output templates and then we'll select the template we're using which is pbr metal roughness i'm just going to delete the mesh name i don't need that and you can see it's going to export everything so i don't need all those things too by going back to the settings and reselecting my output template it'll apply the changes i made then we'll come over here to settings and we'll just uncheck everything except base color you can see it's 4k which is the texture set size right now in my project so that's what we want and now you can just hit save settings or export and we'll hit export and now it's going to save out this map you can see right here in green that means it saved out the map all right so we've spent some time making the base color so far so now i'm just going to open up marmoset to apply it to the model we made in the last video so we can see our texture so far with like a proper ray trace render just to take a look and see where we're at and then make a game plan going forward so let's open up marmoset tool bag now and we'll load it up and take a look this is something that i'm doing all the time by the way when i'm texturing both professionally and for projects is i try to get the connection between the intended renderer and my texture scene or substance in this case so the directory is pointing to the place it's exporting the right textures in the right kind of format so that for the majority of the time afterwards i'm updating the textures and it just overwrites them in substance i can just keep exporting it so when i'm doing projects and like i say for work and everything i'll be exporting you know a few dozen times a day something to keep in mind is something that you should probably be doing so we're not going to like try to make a super nice pretty render for presentation it's the only place where you can actually see your texture like what you're working on so here we are in the scene now so we'll go over to the head material and we will choose our texture that we made so in this case it's going to be the albedo so i'm going to go here and i will select from the directory our image that we exported right here girl demo base color png that we just exported and there we go that's a little dark because i have this gray swatch because that's what i was using to render so yeah we just need to make this white right here and there you go now this is the correct value of our base color in here also because it was just a gray model before there was no color in the scatter depth scatter depth uh this parameter is in all kinds of renders when you're doing subsurface which we're doing for skin right right now we're using volume scattering marmoset is a couple again we'll go into rendering later don't want to overdo this but let's give it some color basically give it a pretty good uh it's kind of a peachy color for color bleed and skin because it's not just red that's bleeding but red is bleeding the farthest so there you go now it looks a little bit more like skin and then let's take a look and form a game plan for texturing moving forward this is just the quality of my viewport i'm going to render out a couple images so we can see with fine detail but already i can tell we're definitely going to need to author a quick spec map and glossiness map for it to feel more like skin right now the glossiness is getting in the way kind of but already i can tell i might want to redo the freckles not really feeling it doesn't feel that natural i like some of the small dark moles and also i want to add some more gradient like some more dark values in particular to like maybe the eyelids maybe underneath the cheekbone and maybe some lighter values around the face mask right now it's a pretty even skin tone i think we could have some general value break up we can see a little bit of that in some of our reference i think we could probably even bring some sharpness so let's take a look at a couple renders here is a render of the model with no texture and here it is with some color yeah like i say i kind of like these moles like a couple of these but the actual freckles i'm not feeling it they're actually very faint too i kind of like the shapes but maybe they're too numerous and close together blackheads aren't feeling that great either i think i might just want to keep a couple and that's it but yeah there's like an evenness so i think we could kind of vary it ears i'm pretty happy with simple but i'm down with that so that's what we're gonna do we're gonna make a quick spec map and we're gonna make a quick glossiness map and then we're gonna update our base color a little bit and then do a couple more renders and see where we're at so let's jump back over to substance right now and start making those changes all right back in substance let's update our base color so first thing i think i'm going to do is update the freckles i'm going to disable warp and blur here so i can just focus on the paint layer uh warp and blur actually moving things around and it could be a little slow to work with so just disabling it is is the way to go then i'm gonna wash out um this and just kind of do a retake i might spend some time keeping some of the shapes i like but honestly i think because of the brush i used it was spraying the dots too close together i think that's kind of the main thing i want to fix is i want to have more opaque dots and i want to get rid of the ones that are so crowded together because i think it was just making it look dirty more than freckles i also felt like it was kind of flat the skin feeling in marmoset so i want to increase the contrast play around with the patterns of my subdermal layers there and also i think what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring the veins or at least one of the veiny layers up on top of my dermis layer that way i've got more control separated out and i can make sure that it's visible i can just mix that on its own all right so doing another pass of the freckles here with the kyle's brush again because it sprays the dots so far apart so i'm trying i'm editing on a separate paint layer now making it larger too so i can spread it out and try to get some of these opaque dots that aren't so close together we can even make our own brush so if i just select the basic brush in spacing i can just max it out i can make sure that the pressure is related to size i can up the size jitter and the position jitter of this brush and just spray the circle that comes with it so it's a way for us to make our own kind of ghetto freckle brush you know you could duplicate this i guess and save it as your own but i mean it's pretty basic stuff but just showing like you can change brush parameters too to make like scatter type brushes and if you had a custom alpha you might want to use that to do something like veins or any kind of pattern but this lets us control how close the dots are together another thing that i think is going to help bring some more interest and contrast to this is add a couple more values you know again i was feeling flat so i'm gonna add a fill layer just call it dark use a little bit of a different color temperature slightly it'll be a darker value so we're doing a little bit more contrast that way and then i can just put a black mask on this and feather it in not just in value but also in color again subtle but this lets me add a little bit more depth to it to push it avoid that flat kind of dead feeling and try to bring a little bit more life to this so i'm going to add some of the darkness like beneath her cheekbones i'm also adding a blur filter on this dark thing because i want to be very feathery like very airbrushy i'll darken the eyes as well because before i was just removing the skin color from the fill layer right which is revealing the redness from below but now with this more brown dark color i'm able to add darkness to the eyelids now that looks more like a discoloration along with dotting it in some other areas here like you see lips and nose and stuff just to bring more of an organic feel i also noticed a little bit of strangeness in the lips like the seal between them so i'm just coming in here to double check in my base color mode and it is confirmed here that like it's not fully colored in there so i think the easiest way to solve this problem make sure that our lip mask is covering everything and there's no like leaking through is to jump over into the flat uv mode here and then switch my alignment mode to uv so that i know i'm just painting in this uv mode there's no 3d whatsoever and then i can just take a brush and make sure i'm filling all these uvs to like get that seal on the lips so we don't see any like bright values in between the lips when our mouth is closed this is just a good way to get into the nooks and crannies so switching over to that view is always really handy and you can do that by pressing f3 all right so we've made our adjustments and our updates to our base color based on what we saw in our renders now we got to address the reflectivity we gotta do the spec and the roughness map so let's talk about doing a specular map okay so now let's author a spec map generally when you're making pbr assets though you don't need to make a spec map again this is gonna layer up right because we've got the normal map detail that we did in the previous video while we're sculpting we've got base color detail of various levels of sharpness and shapes right those two things don't match up so they're mixing together and then we're gonna have some more organic detail in the spec what we're trying to do here is add this subtle complexity when we're looking at the final result pbr metal rough template doesn't have a spec map you really don't need a spec map most of the time for most 3d assets you know you generally set it to like .45 or .4 pretty much everything in the real world reflects light the same we're kind of cheating a little bit because we're going to try to add complexity to the spec so we want to have a texture in there we don't just want to have a solid value to do that we need to change our template and our export settings because the pbr workflow template that we use to start our scene does not have a specular level channel so we'll add that then we'll make a custom export preset so we can export that map to do that though in painter since we don't have it we need to go to the texture set settings and then add a specular level so now we have it you can see over here spec level so i'll just isolate that and we can come over here in our specular level so this is the specular level and right now it's set to 0.5 again like 0.4 probably a good place to start to be able to export this new channel as a texture though we have to make sure it's in our export preset and to do that let's make our own let's duplicate this boink so now we have a copy i'm going to change this so there we go pbr metal rough jh don't need that i don't need emissive most of the time so i guess i'll just get rid of it and if i need it i'll add it back then we're gonna create a gray map and we're gonna do specular level from specular level there we go and we'll just copy this spec boom there so now we have our output template it's going to come in you can see it matches the roughness and then it's an 8-bit because it's just grayscale that's all we need is grayscale so we're good to go and then we need to choose it from here there you go so we're good save settings okay now that we have the channel and we can export it it's pretty straightforward we're just gonna make a new fill layer with some noise as a mask and we can play around with the scale and the value to get some fine detailed breakup we can stack another fill layer on top of that with different noise different shapes and with screen mode we can add them together and then we can create something that's a little bit more complex for now just something generic a noise like this is going to get the job done we just want to make the light a little uneven so that it'll help feel organic for game characters i you i always paint out the nostrils with black on the inside if you can see in here uh so i'll just show you like what i would do so so i would just come in here with actual black and then full roughness and then spec level totally dark and then i would just come in here and i would paint the nostrils so i do this when i'm making game characters because like the shadow resolutions are not enough to make believable shadows in small things like the like this nostril so i'm faking it you know it's kind of hacky if your renderer can do cavity maps it would be more accurate to author a cavity map because that that gets to tell a renderer light doesn't go here you know so like a classic example would be like a sewer grate if you're just doing it in a texture you'd want to black out the holes so nothing would ever show up without having a cavity map this is how you do it so there you go um and then you could come down even more but like you can see the difference you know just we're programmed to map faces and the nostrils being black is like crucial to that so i don't need this to be such with mine but i will just darken it a little bit something else we could do if we wanted to is a cavity so we'll do that we'll do black mask we'll do generator we'll get our curvature cavities the sharp ones good there you go so now we're gonna have a break up like that all right so now pretty quickly we've got a really detailed spec map so this should look nice we can see what it looks like once we export it but now let's make our roughness okay so the roughness map we're gonna make a new folder as we do and we're gonna call it roughness everything can live in this folder i like doing this not only does it keep it organized but you can always just mask the folder so you're controlling one mask with the roughness map really what we're simulating here is oiliness like the variety of glossiness that's on skin like the lips for instance which are wet or may have some lip gloss so we're making something that controls how rough or how smooth something is so the first thing we're going to do is create a base roughness that's just a fill layer with a roughness we can set that to 0.8 something like that we can always change this stuff you know once we export it we can dial it in roughness is something that kind of varies engine to engine but getting it started with a base is the first thing to do and then the next thing is we're just going to create a fill layer that's meant to be the oiliness you know the glossier parts of the face and what i'm going to do to help myself visualize this rather than just paint straight rough right now is when i make my new fill layer i'm actually just going to use color so i can paint the oiliness right on the skin that just helps me in the way i'm thinking and visualizing it and then we can just switch this to roughness when we're done so the basics of this is just the lips obviously going to be glossy especially the most glossy area probably is going to be where the lips touch together in my case because i want it to feel like it's wet and then i'm going to make the lips in general a little bit glossier so this is going to vary character to character but that's what we're gonna do for this this t-zone area it's called of the nose the nostril wing sometimes and a little bit of the upper nose like forehead once we have that maybe the eyes definitely if you can see more of the tear ducts too that would be very glossy and wet the eyes in general will be wet around where the eyelid meets the eye and then the ears sometimes people forget like the inside of the bowl of the ear be a little bit glossy and those are kind of the basic parts i mean we can add to this uh forever but we're just gonna get this going here and so we can adjust our values and maybe the size of these sections but getting a little bit glossier in the cheeks and the nose uh the lips really as long as there is a variety and a contrast in your roughness it's gonna make it feel more believable and alive uh it's the flatness that really kills it so you can see here we're not being very detailed we're just painting down some splotchiness to try to convey something everyone's different every character is different and throughout the day throughout different environments can be different so it's kind of fun making a roughness map because it doesn't have to be very detailed you can make this really fast and it really makes a big impact on the look all right let's get these textures out of substance painter real quick what we have to do is make sure that we're exporting all the maps that we need so if we open up the export settings again we go to the list of exports you can see we've only been exporting base color so we just need to check roughness and spec too so we know it's coming out also double check the size of your textures if you change the texture size in the scene i made my scene 2k which dropped the resolution so i need to re-select 4k so i can be sure to export the high-res maps so once our maps are exported we'll move over to marmoset we'll hook them up so we can take another look but before we do that let's take a look at this video sponsor hello uh from the future i have less hair here in this timeline and i've traveled back to talk to you about skillshare this video sponsor so skillshare if you don't know already is a website i've been a member of for several years where it's got tons of stuff like you can even type in 3d art if you wanted to and you could look at all kinds of stuff made for 3d game art learn to create 3dr for video games wow i just came across this actually i didn't know garyvee had one that was my head right there that was my expression when i found it that was my expression when i found this video i didn't know that garyvee had a video on here about a course about social media strategy and stuff so kind of interesting i'll probably listen to this there's a lot of really talented people that are tapped to make these originals which i really like in the past i've mentioned like mkbhd for instance and like final cut pro editing i also noticed a video about making better youtube thumbnails so maybe i'll step up my youtube thumbnail game while i'm at it but yeah anything that you're interested in really you could find some premium content here on skillshare to learn from and go deeper in so if you haven't already check it out the first thousand people to click the link down below in my description will get a free trial of skillshare and see if you like it so now back to the video let's see if those textures got any better okay so we exported the textures there they are now we're hop back over to mama set the base color is already going to refresh if it doesn't i guess you can just hit this refresh button but it should refresh and then we'll add a couple of our other maps right we have the roughness map so let's load that and remember i can drop down but i can't go up we also have a clear coat roughness which i think i'll point to the same one again we'll talk about this when we talk about rendering backmap boom spec map boom this one we can actually drop the intensity which is cool so we're on draft quality let's just take a quick gander here so i'm going to do a couple high-res renders and we'll take a look and we can just compare the previous renders to where we're at so we've done a couple more renders now let's take a look this is what we had before and here's our update so you can tell obviously a big difference in the specular and roughness and we've cleaned up the freckles the veins in the eyelid i think right here are working that's kind of cool here's the new one here's the old one really the biggest difference is in our roughness feeling it is feeling a bit more like skin lips i'm pretty happy with uh freckles still don't feel that organic and we're also not even though we added it we're not getting a ton of contrast in the base color so let's try to fix that so i'm gonna show you how you can create an adjustment layer in substance painter which you know we used to do all the time in photoshop but people aren't too used to doing it in substance painters so why don't we hop back into substance painter and we'll end with those little updates okay so here we are back in painter what we want to do is kind of just crunch up what we've already got let's go to the base color so yeah i think there's some kind of cool stuff in here but maybe we're losing a little bit so we can do global tweaks so we'll just add a layer here and we'll call this color correction so i did a paint layer right as opposed to a fill layer this is just an empty layer now and what i can do is i can add filters to this and i'll have to make it pass through and then it'll apply everything below it so you'll see what i mean first why don't we just add a hue level saturation you're going to choose what it's filtering right now we're just going to do color and i'll choose hue saturation levels and so you can see i can change something about it if this is set to pass through but to do that i have to go back to base color because that's where we are there we go now we say pass through all right so we're in base color it's affecting base color right here right it's affecting color right here and i have it set to pass through and now everything below it is getting affected and you can see this because it's above it is not so let's reset these all right so what we can do with this is we can kind of play with the uh levels and everything and the saturation bring that up a little bit we can also do things like levels again base color and we can like crank it get a little bit more redness and stuff so we're doing global tweaks now even further i could add a filter and i could say base color uh sharpen right and now we're sharpening it again everything below it right so now without the color correction with the color correction so i can make global changes like that all right so that's adjustment layers now let's get into our final round of updates on our texture so one of the things i noticed was not a lot of contrast or break up so i want to add some breakup i like the cellular noise actually that i was using in the subdermal layer so i'm just going to steal that fill layer and recycle it to make my new layer and then i'll just keep the cells so you can see here the tiny circles it's a very organic pattern it works well for skin and we can make it really tiny we zoom in here so we can see you see it it brings kind of a sharpness and resolution you know to everything too like a chatter you can see when we're really zoomed in here what it's doing breaking up something and the way it mixes with gradients you can see when i turn it off helps to unify everything too with an organic pattern for me too i just want to use a couple blackheads i think this blackheads layer in my scene just got out of control and it's like creating um like kind of a noise really like i want the pores to blend away a little bit in the lighting i don't want to like clog every pore so i'm really just gonna wipe away all this stuff and i'm just gonna leave a couple little black dots here and there on the nose and on the chin and that's it so making it real real simple all right so another thing i wanted to do i mentioned the roughness just kind of making everything more rough because in marmoset i can always lower roughness which would make it glossier right so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to do like we did with the base color layer i'm going to do an adjustment layer here and i'm going to add a levels to it and i'm going to make everything brighter by making everything brighter closer to white i'm making it more rough right which is good i'm bringing up the value that's what i want to do i want to bring up the value of the roughness layer and then which is going to make her feel less glossy which is good but then in marmoset because the way it works i can always drag that slider down and bring back some glossiness if i want so it brings me more control and right now i think it's just a little bit too glossy also want to spend some time on my freckles layer i kind of like some of it but i'd like there to be some more i even kind of missed some of the subtle stuff that was going on in our first pass here so i'm breaking up the edges so it's not uniform you can see i turned off the warp and blur here too so i can just work on these individual dots and i'm just going to add dots here and there with different brushes with just like a basic brush and add some like moles and freckles just more frequent i'm kind of like hand doing them now to fill in the gaps to make as many as i want always doing another pass too on that skin color fill layer filling in the gaps making it feel like it's a little bit more red on the nose and maybe the cheeks and forehead and tweaking the color correction so i've got all the elements i need now really you can iterate forever and you should but for the sake of this demonstration i think we're in pretty good shape to export what we have now and take another look in marmoset and now back over marmoset these will update and then we get a look at our new textures let's uh render out some high-res images again so we can compare a and b and see where we ended up with our textures and we can see where our skin textures ended up here we go this is the before and here's the after so you see we like generally darkened her i really think removing the blackhead layer is good i mean i think just in a couple spots like right here you said i mean like it's interesting i think by removing the darkness from the pores making a little bit more rough this feels more like skin to me if we go back and forth you know it's a little bit reflective before a little bit too much contrast in the detail so i think it's softening up nice i think the freckles look a little bit more believable i like the vein detail and the color differences on the eyelids you can see our evolution from when we started without a speck or roughness map really shiny and then here we are making some improvements and then here we are now so a little bit more subtle darker skin tone i feel like this feels more natural so we do another update and now we've added a lot more just hand placed dots and moles and things taking care to actually just put it and like just make sure that it's not too noisy and stuff so this is obviously really close up under scrutiny with the lighting and things but i think like having the extra veininess in the cheeks things like that is helping to make it feel more naturalistic so i took it a step further i worked on it for a few more minutes and i actually had some of these moles come out in the height you can see here so it's actually like coming out of the height and the light is catching it so i exported the normal map now mixed with this height it combines it so even though the normal map came from zbrush we add the height channels in substance and i can export that even at ak and so we get the merged new height that i've painted with the normal app that i baked so this is where we ended up with the final textures of our skin you can see it here in the various different angles under this kind of neutral lighting scenario i'm generally happy where we ended up and that's where i'll end for now for texturing you could go on forever i really believe the more time you spend texturing like the better it gets there's definitely a point of diminishing returns as it as there is with everything but with texturing i think uh not as much as other things honestly because you know imagine if it's a full costume just adding little bits of detail little bits of wear and tear little bits of different subtle contrast in these different ways and value color material definition you know just bringing more and more life to it as much as you can i think that's what creates such a rich first impression when someone's looking at your work for the first time all that extra time that you've spent making all these little decisions you know just kind of hits someone at once so because there's so much subtle complexity it makes something feel a lot more interesting or believable or tactile and rich so i you know obviously enjoy texturing i think spending a lot of time with it is uh important in making your work stand out and my main tip is to stay organized work as non-destructively as possible and iterate hook it up as soon as you can to whatever render you're doing and make that choice early on stick to it and then just set up the paths and then just be iterating just export export export and that's where you're gonna spend the most time that's it i could talk forever about texturing so i'm gonna stop right there um thank you very much for watching the video i hope you learned something i hope you got something that you could add to your own texturing game on your own projects if you do please let me know and tag me i'd love to see that sort of thing thank you so much for making it this far in the video i appreciate that the full version of this video is going to be up on my patreon i'm just going to try putting up unedited real time i'm even here talking a little bit we're recording it right now what's up patrons thank you for your support so we'll see how that goes i can't do that with everything but this is going to be a real-time demo i'm also putting together some goodies for the patrons this month a little pack of like head assets like this female bass mesh i used for this demo actually i'm also going to include like some other files like the teeth and some textures like the normal map that i used and a displacement map which we'll talk about in an upcoming video but just some assets you guys can use to make your own heads and stuff i also made this little cheeky like ear brush a while ago that you guys can have so like so when you make like head studies and sketches you know you don't have to like make an ear every time you know what i'm saying so just some of the stuff this first kind of downloadable pack that i'm putting up there on the patreon lots more goodies coming up with the patreon if you're interested please consider checking it out and yeah that's it this is how i texture skin in substance painter thank you for watching i'll see in the next video peace out [Music] [Music]

Channel: J Hill

Views: 53,271

Keywords: substance painter, substance painter skin, texturing in substance painter, 3d tutorial, substance painter skin texturing, game art, substance painter tutorial, 3d art, character art, substance painter baking, realistic textures for beginners, substance painter skin shader, skin texturing, texturing skin substance painter, substance painter tutorial beginner, substance painter 2021, substance painter skin tutorial, substance painter skin painting, Zbrush, Skin Texturing

Id: s0DhvFML7oM

Length: 65min 0sec (3900 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021