How to TEXTURE an ORC in SUBSTANCE PAINTER

hey I'm Jared it's been a while but I'm back and today we're going to take a look at how I textured this orc inside of substance painter so this is a bust that I made a couple of years ago based off of the work by cosmen podar I was working on this piece in my free time back when I had started at Turtle rock studios in 2019. back then I was a wee little artist who was kind of afraid of the idea of texturing a character if I didn't have some sort of concept information to go off of well fast forward a few years and I've gotten a bit more comfortable with the idea of creating textures based off of my own gathered reference and that led us to here in this piece I had been thinking of a couple of different types of content that I wanted to make for the channel and I felt like this was a great opportunity to use and finish this piece I had majority of this character already done I had the high poly in a good spot I just had to go from there well because of that I was able to create a couple of other lessons out of this model which you can check out on the page if you haven't already we've gone through the process of uving this model as well as creating the bakes for our low res mesh now the next stage that we're going to want to take a look at is going to be the texturing for this character so like I had mentioned the concept for this character didn't have any texture information on it it was purely a 2d black and white sketch so because of that I had to spend a little bit of time up front Gathering some reference information and trying to formulate ideas as to where I wanted to take this character so for this piece in an effort to help myself in creating my textures the first thing that I wanted to do is start by establishing a kind of story or idea or theme for the direction that I wanted this character to head in for this piece I kind of like the idea that maybe he was a little bit more of a cave dweller wasn't super exposed to light on a day-to-day basis and so some of that kind of influenced the conditioning and tones of his skin color maybe something a little bit more pale as for the armor I wanted the armor to kind of feel relatively new but still used and I wanted the armor to maybe have a little bit of potential for being armor that was stolen in a fight with someone of like kind of a high class power with just those two simple ideas in mind this really allowed me to start to explore a direction that I wanted to take the piece overall so you can see here on my reference board looking for different references I was pulling things like material references some images of movies from things like Lord of the Rings as well as some different pieces from people that I thought had little bits of points of interest that I could start to pull inspiration from now after getting all of my reference out of the way I was able to jump over to substance painter so let's go ahead and take a look at that and see some of our texturing process so the first item that I wanted to tackle was going to be the armor for the character when working I have a tendency of working on clothes and accessories and then moving on to the face last and that's how I tend to approach my characters so I kind of started this one in the same way I try to tackle things that I feel like are easy first so this kind of gives me a little bit of a boost in confidence the first piece of the armor that I went ahead and tackled was the metal pieces metal is one of those really interesting aspects when it comes to texturing where you can create a lot of really cool character in the feel of the metal for the metal the first thing that I really wanted to tackle was establishing a good base material from there I moved on to throwing in some procedurals that added a little bit of variation in color breakup to the surface this gave me a good starting off point like I had mentioned before I had this idea that the character would have this armor that was maybe from someone that was kind of of a high stature so to kind of reinforce that idea I wanted to incorporate some gold trimming to accentuate some of the edges and you know really kind of play into that storytelling inside of the concept there were a couple of edges that I wasn't sure what to do with initially but I felt like these might be good places to kind of create that natural transition between my base metal to something like a gold trim what I texture things like metal it's definitely one of those areas that I try not to go super overboard on the detail front but because of this character and the type of feeling that I wanted to invoke I felt like this was a really good opportunity to kind of try and push that level of detail and see how far I could take it that being said you definitely have to walk a very fine line between the amount of detail that you actually add into the texture because although there is a lot of aging and wear and detail on here I definitely do my best to kind of manicure it so that it isn't too distracting or overpowering I want it to be very subtle and just kind of a little hints and pops and accents across the model and not draw the attention away from you know like the face which is the more important aspect of the character so one thing to take note of is with the original model I didn't always capture every single type of surface imperfection or detail in the high poly that I necessarily wanted so this was another opportunity for me to kind of come back and add some of that that information back in with the textures the details that I feel like I was really missing and was able to capture in my texturing stage was some of the things like Edge wear and some pock marks and surface irregularities as well as some kind of minor scratching on the surface that really helps to sell what the material is at this point you can see that our armor is really starting to take shape what's making it come across and feel so alive and lived in is just multiple layers of variation and breakup on my initial base surface it's just variation of color and roughness to kind of add a little bit more interest and imperfection and believability when layering in my variation and breakup on the surface I really like to spend a heavy amount of focus on how my roughness map looks for this metal that was a huge part of what really ultimately conveyed the look and feel of the metal if I didn't have this roughness map the material would feel kind of flat and not quite as interesting and nuanced and subtle with detail so like I had mentioned a little bit prior I wanted this texture to feel like it had a very high level of detail in it and part of what I used to do that was adding a couple of different layers of rust the first layer of rust that I created was intended to be a little bit more subdued and not stand out quite as much it was a detail that was going to be there but I didn't want it to draw quite as much visual attention and be super distracting to the overall piece so for the initial painting process of my rust layer it was a very long process of painting in and out the rust where I wanted it to be and where I didn't want it this layer was very heavily art directed because without that direction I would end up with the result of armor that feels like it has a ton of rusting and aging and may have not been very well taken care of I wanted this ultimately to be very localized to specific cavities and I wanted it to be a subtle detail and when you look at it it doesn't pull too much attention but it is there so after getting that information in place I wanted to add another rust layer and this layer is meant to be kind of The Punchy detail the rust that you're going to notice on the surface this layer of rust was really meant to accentuate a lot of the specific details on the model I used it by throwing it in some of the cracks and crevices and because of the color it was a little bit more Punchy it drew a little more attention you can notice that on a lot of the main hero scratches of the armor it draws a little bit more focused whereas some of the lighter rust around it isn't quite as much of a focal point that was very intentional at this point in the texturing process for the armor overall I feel like it's in a pretty good spot but one thing that I did feel like it was lacking was a bit of color nuance so to kind of help push that Nuance what I ultimately did was added some layers of orange and blue to create a little bit of discoloration in the basement the nice thing about doing this is it allows for a little bit more interesting color Play Between the metal and the rust with some of these complementary colors between the oranges and Blues so with this layer one thing is it may not seem like it's super pivotal but I do think that this is probably one of the more important layers to introduce on Metals it can really start to make your material feel a lot more organic and interesting it creates a lot of depth to it after tackling the base armor a lot of the major lifting was actually done for the rest of the metals on the character like the helmet I already had a really good starting point with the gold so I was able to just drag and drop that material that I had already created on top of the crown the major thing that I had to tackle on the crown was really art directing where I wanted the rust to be my main focus when painting the rust was I just wanted to capture some of the more small kind of graphic shapes to indicate that there that there was some of that rust there but I definitely didn't want to overdo it I wanted it to be small and kind of just a subtle touch Now by getting the metals out of the way I felt like I was at a pretty good spot overall I was kind of happy with how the textures were feeling and it gave me a way to gauge the level of detail that I wanted to add into the whole character after finishing up the metal I moved on to tackling the leather when starting something like leather the first initial steps that I always take is getting a level of discoloration and breakup on top of my Albedo I like to use some oranges and tans just so that I can introduce some of that irregularity that leather has on a base material Level for the leather I really wanted to convey the idea that the weather had kind of made it super dry and added a lot of discoloration to it I wanted it to feel like it had seen a lot of wear and tear so that was really kind of the idea that I was trying to capture because I knew that that was going to be the direction that I wanted to take it I knew that I was going to need a lot of different layers of discoloration as well as breakup in my roughness map after getting some good breakup on my Albedo I'll move on to doing the same process with my roughness Maps as well this is going to be where the material really starts to come together in my opinion which is the strong roughness map which I have mentioned before the roughness map is probably your most important map when it comes to a PVR texture for these layers I like to find maps that have some very interesting breakup to them some of the maps that I pick I like to pick just for the specific shape that they may have in the texture I'll use those specific shapes and kind of extract them and overlay them on top of my base so that I can start to build up some interest after moving through and tackling my roughness breakup you can see that I have a little bit of rebalancing that I need to do it doesn't feel quite there yet but to help kind of push it in that right direction I start introducing Edge lightning and discoloration on the edges to kind of indicate some of that breakdown that's occurred over time at this point in the leather texture a lot of what I've done has been building up procedural discoloration but once I start to introduce the edge lightning I'm a little bit more intentional where I want this information to be trying to reinforce some of the sculpt detail that I put inside the model as well as create new points of detail and interest you can see that I'm using some of this light discoloration to put in some of the gouges that are in the leather as well as adding a little bit of tear and damage where the leather might start be starting to fall apart it's a nice point of interest that kind of helps illustrate what the weather is doing over time some of the stuff that I may have not been able to actually capture in the model so from here it definitely is starting to feel a lot more like leather it has that feeling that I'm going after but there's still an opportunity to kind of push this detail a little bit further so to do that what I did was introduce some cracking detail with the procedural I wanted to add a little bit of the effect to kind of make the leather feel a little bit more dry like some of the cracks are starting to take place and it hasn't been quite as taken care of at this point the leather looks pretty good it's definitely in a spot that if I wanted to I could call done and move on but there was one final detail that I wanted to try and introduce and that was going to be a layer of kind of black flaking across the surface unfortunately I didn't capture that step on camera but you can see the result of some of the detail here it's just a little bit of a layer to add kind of Punchy details on top of the leather I don't want this to be too overpowering but it was a nice little interesting touch that I was able to add that made the leather feel a little bit more interesting maybe like there were kind of burn marks or you know this orc had used something close to fire and some of those you know flares had gotten onto the leather and caused some of this damage the next piece of the character that I have to tackle is going to be the cloth cloth is always one of those things that I feel like is really tricky to get in capture in 3D a lot of that stems from the fact that I feel like there's always missing qualities from what you would expect cloth to look like inside of substance painter it's missing that kind of Buzzy feel which can only be captured inside of the render engine so I'm never entirely happy with how my cloth looks when I'm texturing it but in spite of that overall I was pretty happy with the cloth that I was able to get with this piece obviously I wasn't too worried about it feeling too overly dirty I was really able to kind of play and add a lot of stains and variation to get some breakup to the color and roughness so that it felt more used and interesting and dirty one thing that you'll notice here that I did is I actually did capture the detail of the fabric inside of substance painter in a lot of cases this isn't necessarily the workflow that I would go for on fabrics and the reason for that is because I feel like I can get a little bit higher better richer quality inside of the engine with using something like a detailed normal map instead but for this piece I felt like I was able to really get something that worked and kind of looked good inside of the engine so I just ultimately ended up sticking with this as my final result so at this point I've gone through and I've tackled the accessories for my orc next we're going to start to move on to some of the skin aspects like the teeth and the gum and the face area as well as the eyes for the skin and the teeth I didn't really have the best direction that I wanted to go with but I did have a couple of ideas of things that I wanted to try and incorporate one of the main things that I really kind of found was an interesting detail was these white kind of abscesses on the gums I really tried to pull out some of the discoloration and variation in the gums as well to make sure that I was kind of reinforcing this idea that they weren't super healthy to do that I Incorporated a lot of just kind of high level textures to add some interesting variation and breakup and try and kind of capture some of those big surface value changes by this point in the process I'm starting to get the model inside of marmoset so that I can really start to do some iteration and look development on the different materials that I have like the cloth and the metal I want to make sure that all of that stuff is starting to read well that's going to give me an opportunity to really start to hone things in in terms of my art Direction and continue to refine and make adjustments so that everything feels a little bit more cohesive this also brought me to setting up the gums which still feel like they're at a place where they're not quite where I want them at for the final product but it was giving me an option to get them in see how they were looking and from here I was able to kind of pivot and polish and bring them together with the rest of the character so after doing a little bit of texturing on top of the gums I was in a good spot and I was able to move on to the teeth this is where I was able to kind of start to bring both of these two together in line the hard part about texturing all of these different parts though is I'm kind of texturing them a little bit separate from each other so they're not quite as cohesive so you can notice that the gums at one point the the values were a little bit out of whack compared to what I wanted them with the other parts of the model so I had to go through and kind of massage those values after I had done my initial step of texturing both the teeth and the gums when texturing the teeth I used a lot of different gradients to break up the details of the teeth one of the prominent ways that I find making interesting variation on teeth is actually by using something as simple as like a marble pattern it has a lot of really kind of interesting breakup in terms of the coloration and some kind of little veiny lines to it that really kind of is an interesting believable kind of texture that I feel like can be cross used for something like teeth so again at this point I'm really starting to iterate based on what's in substance painter and what I'm seeing inside of marmoset and that definitely applied for the teeth one of the big things that I'm noticing between my teeth and my gum is I'm missing a key piece which is a transitional match and that's something that I'm gonna have to worry about a little bit later in the process but what those transitional meshes are going to be is it's just going to be a thin little piece of geometry between the tooth and the gum so that I can start to kind of blur out the harsh lines between both of these models so that they feel like they're a little bit more together without that mesh it definitely feels like the two models aren't quite seated together and as cohesive this is a nice little technique to just kind of help push the um the look of the meshes a little bit further into kind of higher quality after getting the gums and teeth out of the way the next piece that we got to worry about is gonna be the skin which if you're curious about texturing skin I do have a video with a little bit more of a full length coverage approach to it that you can see some of that process I use that same sort of technique and process when texturing this piece as well now like all of my characters I started this one off in the same manner that I always do I really start to worry about some of the underlying subdermal texture information for this character I thought that this piece was going to be very important because of the fact that I kind of wanted to have this pale sort of skin so some of this information was going to be a little bit more prominent and visible underneath the skin now one thing to know when I was texturing this character there actually was a little bit of a struggle to kind of get the skin tones that I wanted and getting something that I felt like worked at a certain point I kind of felt like I was pushing it a little bit too saturated and I had a lot of Reds in there and it was kind of making him feel like he was sick which you know that could have been played into the story but it wasn't really the direction that I wanted when picturing something that isn't quite human or doesn't really exist I usually feel like that is kind of the initial struggle with the piece is getting that kind of right balance of colors that work in the direction that you're aiming for though like I had mentioned earlier at this point I'm really starting to focus on iterating between substance and marmoset and the skin is a really big reason as to why like I had mentioned there is a lot of discrepancy between what I wanted and what my textures are actually looking like so the more I was able to really iterate and check and see how things were looking in the engine at this point the easier it was for me to make decisions on what I was working on and really kind of hone into the direction that I wanted when texturing skin I do feel like this is a common thing that I tend to run into you just kind of have to find the right balance of colors but when going through the process I just know that I have to trust the steps that I've established for myself and by the end I know I'm going to get a result that I like I just kind of have to continue to keep moving forward and this piece was definitely much the same of that that was very much the case with this character after going through the process of painting all of my zones and details and the things that I wanted to incorporate into the character I felt like it wasn't quite there but I was able to kind of massage it into place to ultimately get the result that I wanted and for most pieces I wouldn't necessarily say that this is the case but definitely with this piece I feel like where everything started to kind of gel and come together was the detail pass one of the main features on the detail pass that I really wanted to illustrate was the discoloration of the surface of things like sun spots and moles and just some of that irregularity that I thought some of the skin damage could cause on this character to do this I used a lot of different tiling textures to get some of these kind of like irregular drip spot marks because I felt like this kind of had some interesting shape and break up to the skin I did this with a couple of different layers I tried to capture some large frequency details which you can see as kind of these big purple shapes over the mouth and some medium shaped details with kind of Darker spots on the nose and the forehead and also some smaller frequency details with some orangish and yellow colors that are subtle across the surface after a couple of layers of this I was pretty happy with how the skin was looking it was definitely feeling very cohesive at this point and it was falling in line with kind of the direction that I wanted but there was a couple more elements that I wanted to talk about the main element that I wanted to really try and capture with this character was some kind of like flaky damaged skin that had been exposed after like sunburns or things like that now the process for capturing these shapes was actually pretty straightforward I just used a tiling splatter noise that I had and this gave me a lot of these kind of big interesting shapes of maybe like exposed sunburn marks and at first glance it doesn't look great but I was able to introduce the missing part of it which was going to be adding some raised flaking skin around the edge this I just went in and kind of hand painted this detail with a little bit of height so that I had kind of these interesting sort of sunburn marks and they were reinforced by the tertiary detail of kind of this flaking skin effect on the edges so after that I was able to kind of call this skin texture done I was happy with the direction but one thing I was starting to notice inside of the render engine was that my materials were feeling a little bit latexy so next I had to tackle my roughness and subsurface to really just kind of bring the piece together as a whole both of these Maps were pretty straightforward the main thing that I really had to solve was just kind of figuring out how I was going to incorporate the skin flaking so that it didn't feel quite as gummy as the rest of the skin now the last piece to bring it all together was the eyes the eyes are always the trickiest piece for any character in my opinion if they don't look right the whole character kind of falls apart so because of that over the past couple of years I put a lot of time into making eyes that I really liked and felt like looked good and this piece I wanted to kind of try and push those eyes a little bit further the actual construction of the eye is for the most part all using the ray tracing eye model that I built in the past Shameless plug if you're interested in checking out eyes I do have a couple of options on my art station store so make sure to check out the link below if you want to check those out now where the eye really differed in terms of construction and texturing was just in a couple of different aspects I modified it to kind of fit the needs of the character in terms of the iris shape but I also wanted to take this eye and kind of push it a little bit further using some different transitional meshes and points of interest kind of to help integrate it a little bit more with the character in the head the first touch that I wanted to add on this eye was kind of trying to push the idea of maybe like Atarax or this kind of Blind Eye effect so to do this I just used a simple mesh that I placed inside of the iris and gave it a couple of different metallic properties this added a little bit more depth to the eye as you can see when I move the lights around it really starts to illustrate what the effect looks like the second touch that I added was going to be a transitional mesh between the eye and the eyelid this mesh is used to accomplish the same effect that I talked about a little bit earlier with the teeth here you can see the mesh and what it is doing this just kind of helps seats the two meshes together so that they feel a little bit more intact and cohesive with that last touch we brought this whole piece together on the texturing front so that's how I went about texturing this word character so like I mentioned at the start of the video I started this piece a number of years ago if I were to go back and texture this model when I had initially made it I don't think it would have turned out half as well as I think this version did which I think that this is a great way to remind yourself how much better and more knowledgeable you get with each and every piece I was able to really kind of improve over those years so when I came back to this piece I feel like I was kind of able to turn it up a notch as opposed to what I would have done back at that time now hopefully you were able to get something out of this tutorial if you enjoyed it make sure to subscribe as we're going to continue with the next step of this piece and we're going to tackle the x-gen hair so if that interests you make sure to keep an eye out for that also for those who don't know we actually live streamed a majority of this character so if you're interested in checking out some character production in real time make sure to stop by the streams where we work on modeling texturing lighting rendering and anything in between those gaps lastly if you guys have any suggestions for future content make sure to throw in the comments below and I'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Jared Chavez

Views: 17,328

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Id: lbMaYHlflp0

Length: 28min 42sec (1722 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2023