How to Use Substance Painter With Cinema4D in Your Workflow

hello good morning good afternoon good evening depending on what time it is for you right now my name is Ryan Talbott and in this tutorial I will be showing you a little bit of my workflow and how I prepare my models from cinema 4d for substance painter and so we're gonna start with merging our model down into polygons using the UV setup wizard how to build detailed materials quickly in substance painter and then finally importing and applying this materials instead of a 14 with optimum so let's get started so as you can see here I have this robot droid that I quickly modeled up in cinema 4d the body and the arms are definitely not high poly at all but the goal of this is to build up something in substance painter and add additional details so that you don't even notice that it's literally just a qubit I use symmetry objects as sweepnurbs as well as lofts and in order to UV map this and turn it into something that can be interpreted by a substance painter we have to merge these down into regular plain old polygons so the way I'm gonna do that is just by right-clicking well actually first duplicate the whole thing and I'm going to rename this merged and then I'm just gonna hide our original model just by alt clicking on these two dots right here and that'll just will just keep this for safekeeping in case we ever need to go back and grab something out of here so now we have this and I'm just gonna select everything right-click and current state to object and then hit delete and that will just leave us with polygons pretty much and from here on out it's basically just cleaning this up so I'm going to grab these for example which is our back wheel and I'm just going to right click and choose connect objects and delete and then rename this we don't 1 and I'm just going to do this for the other two as well okay now I'm just gonna grab these I'm gonna pull them out of all those nulls because we don't really need these anymore and one thing that is important in my case is that this body actually is two cubes on top of each other because they were in the symmetry object so it's actually pretty important for me to recopy this original body back over and delete that one that was baked down from the symmetry object as well as the head I believe those are the only two objects where that happens in this case so I'm also going to replace the head with the original okay so now you should have something that looks like this all separated separated and properly named polygons so that you know what each group is and these are all going to import into substance painter as separate objects and textures so the next thing we need to do is UV unwrap this and this will be extremely painless we're going to delete all of our current uvw tags that is very important you can keep the selection and font tags if you wish so now we're going to go into BP UV edit mode and select this right here paint setup wizard deselect all and then I'm going to select Robo dude merged and make sure that all of our objects are selected it next make sure a single material mode is unchecked next and this doesn't really matter because we're going to be creating our textures in substance painter nut cinema4d make sure to create create missing materials is checked and then everything else is good hit finish it's going to do its magic hit close and now it's all UV unwrapped so we can check this by for example grabbing the arm and you can see the UV set right here and if it does not show up make sure you select one of these materials right here and select UV mesh show me a mesh and it will show up so the way we can check if this actually is mapped properly is by going over to materials and let's just double click right here to create a material just real quick and then grab our paint brush and if our color is set to black then we should be able to draw right on this and you can see it is in fact showing up on the texture as well and then we can rotate and look at it and there you go there's our UV unwrapped objects cool so now I can actually go back in to start up and select our merged version of the robot and then I'm going to do ctrl C and just quickly create a new document and paste him in there and we don't need to copy over the textures because we're going to redo all that anyways so we're select your dude export and we're going to export this as an FBX you can also export as an obj for substance painter I'm not really sure what the advantages or disadvantages are for each one but I just generally do FBX so I'm going to rename this Robo dude UV max tutorial because I already went through this whole process just by myself so that I knew what I was doing before I start recording this tutorial just so I knew it alright so hit save that's all okay and now we're gonna jump over into substance painter okay so here we are in substance painter the first thing I'll do is hit ctrl n to create a new document and then I will select my mesh then I will change the document resolution to 2k if you choose 4k keep in mind that editing your materials will become pretty laggy and this can be frustrating so I'm gonna keep mine at 2k and hit OK alright so you can see we have our model on the left and our textures on the right I'm gonna come over here and rotate the environment just so you can see that the lighting is in fact being reflected not only on our model but the 2d texture set to go along with it so with that in mind the first thing I do in substance painter is hit this baked textures button right here underneath texture settings and in this case we're not gonna worry about the thickness id world space normal or normal just these three right here and you have the option to bake it for just this object or all texture sets and in this case I'm gonna hit all and then I'm just gonna let that do its thing okay so now that I have my texture is baked down here let's get started on building the material the first thing I'll do is hit ctrl alt right click while hovering over my body to select that object and so you can do this with anything to select the arm the head the antenna etc and again I'm just doing that by hitting ctrl alt right click on the object and now selected and if you've ever used Photoshop which I'm sure most of you have substance painter works exactly like Photoshop so you have all your layers right here and then you can create folders as well as adjustment layers etc so I'm actually just gonna start by heading down to my shelf and dragging this aluminum smart material on top of my body and you can see immediately we already have this great procedurally generated metal base to work off of so I'm gonna delete that original layer one just because we don't need it and now what I want to do is I want to create a paint layer on top of this but I want this metal part to shine through just around the edges and our curvature mouth will come in handy for that so I will create a new fill layer up here new filler and I'm just going to rename it paint okay so I want the base color for my paint to be some kind of faded red maybe something like this will do and the next thing I'm going to do is add a mask so add a black mask and you can see now all we're seeing is the aluminum because our our paint layer is completely masked off right now so I'm gonna head under this menu right here and add a generator to that mask and once you have the generator you're gonna select this and then choose ng metal Edgware so I'm going to select that and now you can see at the very edge of this material the red is actually shining through now but we actually want the opposite so I'm gonna head over to the parameters and I'm just going to invert that and now the problem is that it's very thin so I'm going to increase the wear level and you can already see it's doing some pretty cool stuff and this is all procedural and we've just created this in just a few clicks really so the next thing I'm going to do is change the grunge scale from four to one and actually and that way we just we don't see the tiling happening because if you increase the scale you can see exactly where it's tiling so we're just gonna scale that back down and now that looks pretty good another thing to do is on the paint layer so for each layer you have you're gonna have a height roughness metallic opacity and normal slot and emissive slot but actually we don't need opacity or emissive so over in our texture set settings I'm just going to erase these two channels and now we just have the ones that we want to work with so what I'm going to do is increase the metallic level of this paint and just to show you what this does that full effect now this actually looks it looks like painted aluminum but I actually want this to be more of like its own paint not as if it were brushed into the luminol but as if it were its own paint layers so I'm gonna reduce this back down to about 0.4 and you can see what the roughness will do if I bring that down to zero now it's extremely reflective so I'm going to increase that to maybe something like 0.2 so next I'm going to show you how to add some hard surface details into our material all through the normal Maps and it won't require any sculpting or modeling so we're gonna head over to our shelf and check out the hard surfaces tab and in here you're gonna find all these cool sci-fi look and objects that can all be stamped onto our model through normals so the first thing I'm gonna do is create a new layer not a fill layer just a regular layer and rename it hard surfaces and now I'm going to come over to the material and I'm gonna disable all these channels except for normal that way when we're stamping our normals on it's not overriding any color or roughness metal etc information that has already been stacked on to our material down here we're only adding normals on top of what we already have so I'm going to grab this door looking thing and I'm going to drag this into our normal slot and as you can see here in our window I now have this brush with the normal applied to it so I'm gonna scale up that brush as well as get rid of the alpha which is on it because you can see the edges are being clipped off right now and we're going to get rid of that by just coming down to our brush and deleting that alpha and now we can see the full normal I'm also going to put up on the screen right now a list of shortcuts related to the brush such as how to resize and rotate etc so that I don't have to explain them all because it can be a little bit confusing [Music] okay great now that you know all the shortcuts I'm going to show you this tab right here which basically has all the same parameters so you can zero in that rotation exactly how you want it and then I'm going to come over here size this up a little bit and just stamp this right on to my hard surfaces layer and you can already see that it looks as if this door is on our model and you know what I'm actually gonna rotate this so that it it's oriented like you would expect a door to be oriented more like that okay but it doesn't stop there folks so now I'm gonna go down to my effects tab and add a filter to this and this is where it gets even cooler so you're gonna scroll down and find something called Matt effects detail edge where and when you find that you want to click on it and immediately you see the aluminum is now shining through around the edges of our normal so if you remember earlier we did the same thing with our ng metal edge where so that the aluminum sort of shines through around these edges as if the paint were being ripped off but now it's applying that to our normal as well so it's basically as if this were baked into the model except it's just a normal map which is pretty darn cool so yeah really just have fun with this guys so let's say I want to add a little latch on to this dude so I'll come down to where my normal was and I'm gonna X this out and replace it with this little latch and then scale this down and just stamp this on somewhere right there and immediately now we have a lash and another cool thing is you can come over to Matt effects right here and you can adjust the amount of wear manually and this is you know independent of your curvature map which is doing the work to make that aluminum shine through on the edges yeah so that's that folks okay guys now there's one more thing we're gonna add to this material just to take it to the neck level of crunchiness and dirtiness and really layer on that filth so we're gonna create a new fill layer this time and I'm going to name this rest and we're gonna leave all our channels enabled and all we have to do is we're gonna add another filter and this time we're gonna scroll down past mat effects detail Edgware and this time we're going to enable matte effects rust weathering so I'm going to click on that and right now it doesn't look like anything's happening so you just have to increase the stress spreading right here and immediately you can see this amazing once again procedurally generated rust just just covering your objects and this is where our position curvature and ambient occlusion Maps are really coming into play because as you can see here the rust is dripping from this arm and that's because we baked our ambient occlusion map so it knows that the ambient occlusion is happening here and it's saying ok that's where I'm going to make it the rustiest and that's where I'm going to drip the rest from so that's all because we baked that in the very beginning and our position map is coming into play because you can see that's how it knows where what direction to drip that rust into you know that's how it knows that this is the top of the material so nothing's dripping and that this is the side of the material so it is dripping and that this is the bottom so that's where the position in ambient occlusion maps are really coming into play so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to change the mode from normal to multiply so we have a rust but you can see in adding the rust we lost some of that metalness that was shining through before on our normals so the way we fix that it was you just move our rust underneath the hard surfaces layer and now we got all that wonderful metallic detail shining back through like it's supposed to the next step is to turn this into a smart material so that we can just easily copy and paste it on all of our other objects so all you have to do is create a new folder up here and I'll just name it grunged up v2 and that's because I actually already created this smart material but I'm just going to do it again real quick to show you the process drag it in that folder and then you just right click on it and we are going to go and find create smart material so I'm going to click on that and you can see now we have grunged up v2 right next to the original and that I created so now let's select our arm so I'm going to do ctrl alt right click to select the arm grab our grunged up v2 and drag that on top and voila now it is immediately applied to our arms and we can do the same exact thing for our other objects so now one thing that you'll notice is that there is a scene going on right here and that's because back when we UV mapped our object we use the UV setup wizard and it's not perfect so it did create that little scene there so if you're really good at UV mapping and that's your thing then definitely feel free to go back and fix that but I'm going to show you another solution because this tutorial is really just meant to show you how to quickly get things done and this is how I do things in my workflow so I'm just going to show you another workaround okay so I'm gonna select my head and create a new layer and this will just be a regular layer and I'll name it paint touch and we've talked a lot about how you can do things procedurally in substance painter but now I'm going to show you how you can actually physically just paint directly onto the object and that's how we're gonna cover up this this line and so I'm just gonna sample basically the gray paint a little bit over sample the brown paint a little bit over example the red etc and so right now if I try to sample a color it will actually be inaccurate because we're seeing the whole material we're seeing it with the specular with the bumpiness the bump and the roughness and so the way I get around that is by pressing C and now all we're gonna see is the color Channel without any lighting affecting it whatsoever so then under my shelf I'm gonna head over to brushes and I've already got my dirt brush selected and the next step with my paint patch layer selected is to sample the color so under base color I will select this and drag this over over a red right here and scale this down and start painting over and then I'll sample a little bit at the gray right here and it paint that over as well and we're just we're just adding variation here to cover up this line and now I'll sample this Brown to just keep doing that same thing really and I'm just gonna keep keep painting this over until the whole line is gone [Music] okay and now you can see how this this patch is pretty well covered up and if I hit em to bring back my full material the seam is now gone and I'll toggle this on and off so you can see the difference there and that's all just with sampling the color and selecting some different brushes and painting over that seam so we can go ahead and do the same thing with this side as well as down here and any other seams you may have on your object okay so the next thing I want to show you is texturing these tire treads so with the object selected I'm actually going to go into my smart materials and find something called plastic armor mat I will drag this on top of layer 1 and you can see that this already gives us a nice base for our tiger treads so on top of that I'm going to create a new fill there and rename it treads then I'm going to disable all the channels except for Heights and in the height channel I'm going to search pattern which I've already searched and if you scroll down you're gonna find something college stripes so I'll select stripes and twirl down the pattern menu right here and change shift from ten to zero which will straighten these out the width to 0.75 and then the number of stripes I'm just gonna crank up to 100 and now you can see we got some cool tire treads going on in the height map the next step is to add some dirt to this so I will come over to my brushes and make sure I select my dirt one brush and create a new layer and call it dirt and then in the material I'm going to disable opacity and a mission and metalness because we don't need those and I've already chosen my sort of brownish base color and if you see when I start brushing this on here you can already see I got some bump going which is adding some nice detail in there and that's because I have this height slider right here but next I'm also going to select the normal and and a little grunge texture in there and now you'll see and now you'll see when I start drying on here there is actually variation in the color so that's just a little little quick workaround for that and then I'm just gonna brush this in here another thing you can do is take your eraser and start erasing some of the finer details chiseling away at it and okay let's say I'm happy with that how it is the next thing I do is I'm just gonna very quickly add some smart materials to these wheels as well as the cables antennae and eyes and that's actually something that I already built it's called base metal one so I'm gonna select my eyes and just drag this on top and all it is is two layers so the first one is our base metal sort of and you can see there's a roughness map in here called grunge scratches dirty and on top of that is our curvature map so you can see what that's doing probably better if I apply it to this wheel right here so there's the curvature map on the edges if I disable its layer you can see what that's doing and once again that's just thanks to our curvature map that we baked in okay and the last thing I'm gonna do is actually add some more hard surfaces to his arm and maybe some more hard surface details to the body as well [Music] [Music] okay great and now I'm ready to take this back into cinema 4d for octane render so when I'm all done I'm gonna hit save and go up to file export textures and now you can see all our texture sets right here at the correct document size and then you just change your output path up here to your location and when you're ready just to export and when it's done you have the choice to open the folder and that will show you exactly where it stuck all your textures and here it is exactly what we're looking for so next all's catch you back in cinema 4d welcome back to cinema 4d this is where we left off with our dude with all these white textures he's all UV mapped and we're going to utilize these which are already named and ready to go to apply our textures too so I'm going to select all of them and go up to materials and quickly convert these into octane materials and now you can see there's duplicates of them and they're all loading one at a time and they've already been replaced for us conveniently in our objects window so I'm gonna go down to function and hit remove unused materials and now that leaves us with only the octane materials so I'm actually just going to show you how to plug in one of these and then sort of skip ahead and show you what it looks like when it's all put together so I'll go ahead and open up the body which is a glassy texture and that's what we want and then let me go and grab our texture folder okay so I have my texture folder right here and I'm gonna start by just going into here and adding an image texture node so I'm actually going to copy this channel right off the bat so that I can easily paste it into these other channels and I'm gonna go in here and drag my body base color and now you can immediately see our color map is on the dude so I'm gonna go into specular paste channel drag body metallic and rinse and repeat okay now that we have all our channels in here I'm gonna get rid of this and expand this back out here and now you can see our texture and octane so let me put some light in here so that we can sort of see what's going on with the specular information and you can sort of see already let me camera how this is just white even though it was metallic and substance painter so the way you fix that is going down to index and we need to change our index from one point three either we can go up or we can go down to one and that will give us this perfectly metallic material and you can see how that changed immediately and that's how you fix that congratulations guys you made it to the end of the tutorial this is sort of what your robot should look like by the end as you can see I added some other basic environment and details with octane so for the eyes I created in a blackbody emission and distribution is controlled by noise and texture is a bluish hue and on top of that we have a glass type material and the opacity is being controlled by a noise and that noise allows the emission to sort of shine through and make it look as if the lens is cracked so I'm just going to quickly recap what we went over in this tutorial we started with merging our model preparing it and turning it into polygons using the UV setup wizard to very painlessly and automatically create movies for our model then bringing that into substance pater and how to quickly add procedural detail and cover up any seams from our UV textures and then importing that back and applying the materials in cinema 4d in my case with octane rendering but of course you can apply that too any render you're reducing thanks guys I really hope you found something useful out of this and I'll see you around you

Channel: Ryan Talbot

Views: 145,047

Keywords: VFX, Cinema4D, Substance Painter, Octane Render, Workflow, Tutorial, MDC

Id: rVgWV6A4JUA

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 14 2018