Paint on Normal Map: Painterly Texture Maya/Substance Painter

welcome to the demo for my 2023 Capstone project we are doing this specific texture that involves normal maps and I wanted to create this demo so that I could showcase how exactly the texture is accomplished so if we take a look at this for example I can show it here this is sort of the end result right we can take a look and see this cat this is something that I recorded before and you can see this really interesting painter texture that's all over the cat's body and over here on the side we can see the normal map laid out and it creates this really interesting texture so to start out here I've just got Maya and we're going to go through the entire process step by step just to give an example of how you can accomplish this so after fiddling a little bit I'm happy with this little guy I don't even know what he is we're just going to name him uh Bob this is Bob he's going to be our little test subject our little showcase guy so what we're going to want to do is we need to make sure of a few things one this works best on one solid object so I highly recommend that whatever shape you're trying to do make sure it's one object you can do a few objects but it'll just take a little bit longer for this we just got the one shape we've just got Bob then we're going to go UV and we're going to go into our UV editor this is super important we need to make sure that our little Bob is unwrapped now you don't have to do this you can unwrap it in any way that you want as long as it it works out I prefer to just do the unwrap because it tends to do it pretty well I mean look at that that's all nice and neat and organized all ready for us once we have Bob unwrapped we're going to go ahead go back into object mode and we are going to export him and we're going to export him as an fbx demo I like to make a folder just for fbxs in my project folder so we're just going to call this bob1 export selection now that we've exported him as an fpx we are going to go into substance painter this is how I import things we're going to go into our fbx folder there's Bob we're just going to click and we're just going to drag Bob right into here all of this is good you you want to make sure that in the new project thing don't select any template don't worry about that there's our file there's Bob document resolution we want that to be 248 because that's the resolution that Maya uses for its UVS everything else you don't need to uh touch okay so here we have Bob he's in here now looking beautiful very chubby and cute now there's a few things we have to do before we can start our painting we're going to go and we're going to click on the little croissant for our baking and in here this is the tool that substance painter uses to create various Maps you know when you're using the process of creating maps and then you put it into Maya to make a material and you have all those little images and you can put them into stuff this is where substance painter makes those the we only need two of them though so we're going to go over here common settings we are just going to do deselect all mesh maps and then we're just going to select the normal and the world space normal now it's important that we select just these two because if we didn't if we had all these selected it wouldn't hurt anything but it would mean that we would have a whole bunch of extra files that we aren't really going to ever use so just to keep things simple we only need the essentials the normal and the world space normal now that we've selected those I'm going to go ahead and bake selected textures you see it does that real quick and then we'll just return to painting mode okay so what did that do for us baking those things does two things things one it means that now we can go down and we can look at our mesh maps and we can go to world space normal and oh wow Bob looks really colorful doesn't he this is our world space normal all these different colors what they mean to in the brain of a computer is it tells the computer how light interacts with the object it says something about the surface of the object the reason this method works is because we're going to trick the computer into thinking that there's texture that isn't really there just like how you have normal maps for like gravel texture and stuff a lot of people use this method in order to create texture without having to create extra geometry that bogs down the computer but instead of making a sort of like texture of sand or gravel we're going to make paint Strokes so we have this map and we have you know all these other things but if I'm on my world space normal and I go and I click on a brush say my basic hard brush mesh maps are not paintable I can't paint on this that's really annoying I really wish that they would just get rid of that but I can understand why because this is something that the program has generated so it doesn't really want us to mess with it so how do we paint on this well we're going to go go first into our texture set settings and you can see that we have the normal and we have the world space normal we're just going to ignore those for right now the first thing you're going to want to do is from here go to the texture set settings you're going to look for something called normal mixing we're going to change that to replace that's super important this will not work if you do not change it to replace it's going to be on combine uh just out of the gate but change it to replace then the next thing we're going to do is we're going to create a fill layer but we're going to change this to normal then we're going to create a fill layer and you see it's going to be blue what this fill layer is doing is it's creating a whole fill layer and since we're in the normal settings it's going to treat all the color of the fill layer as though it is part of the normal map so we can take a look at our normal and this is what that looks like but we're going to change this to be our world space normal so we can go ahead and delete this layer and I'm going to change this blending mode and we're going to change it to normal and that will allow us to paint on this well almost it's an important step the next thing we're going to do is down in our material properties for our fill layer we want to get rid of all of these little things except for normal because we don't want to be painting on any other aspect of this material except for the normal map the next thing we're going to do is we're going to change the color so right now we have this weird it's like entirely blue and we just don't want that we want Happy rainbows happy Rainbows are what we want so we're going to go into our texture that's this little guy you can scroll all the way down to the bottom or you could just type in World space like this world and it should pop up right away there's our world space normal for Bob we're just going to click this and we're going to drag it down into this color so now let's take a look at what the material looks like after we do that material o you can see how the lighting on Bob has changed changed pretty significantly if I undo that there he is normally Boop back on how has this happened well the world space normal now that we've put it in place of where our normal is ooh it's all colorful super colorful and it's telling the camera how these things interact with light and you can see now it's on a single channel so we should be able to paint on this you may notice it's still fill layers are not paintable so what we're going to do is we're going to right click on our fill layer we are going to go down we're going to add paint and just like with our fill layer we want to take out all of these things so that we are only doing the normal nrm we only want to interact with the normal and just like our fill air instead of having it on this setting we're going to change it to normal all right now that that's all done I should be able to take my little eye dropper go on to Bob here and let's take a look at this soft Edge that's super pretty but what if I wanted to ooh look at that wow so we're like painting little things on it and there you go you can paint on them now if we take a look at the material it's actually doing interesting things with the lighting so now the lighting if we were to take this into Maya Maya interprets that as ooh that is one whole side of Bob and that side is this level of lightness so we can go normal and we can do really any texture at this point let's say that Bob you look like you could be made out of whatever whatever texture we want to do what is this dragon scales oh heck yeah Bob you want some dragon scales it's not the best um this probably isn't the best application of it we go and do and do the brush that I used for all of these guys should be this one yes this is a Photoshop brush archive inor I just really like the texture that it has on it so how do we get our paint stroke effect well I'm going to increase the size of my brush a little bit yeah that's better and I'm just going to go through this process of I'm going to ey drop a color I'm going to kind of oop Boop I drop a color next to it boop boop and we kind of want to do this especially to the edges of the object I think those are some of the most important parts but we're really just going around and simplifying out these colors where we see these these nice gradients they're nice but we can really take advantage of them and turn them into sort of solid paint Strokes just keep doing the ey dropper keep going around Follow The Edge flow or the intended Edge flow of our character just like that I'll get back to you when I'm done doing this but I'm going to go over Bob and I'm going to follow sort of this idea for Bob's face and I'm going to do this to the rest of the character okay so now that we've gotten all of Bob sort of textured up here in my nice little painter style it's already coming together it's already looking pretty nice and you can see over here on my normal map this is what the UV set looks like all laid out I didn't do the bottom because well we're not really going to see it don't feel bad about avoiding areas or just ignoring areas of the character that are never going to be seen you know work smarter not harder another step that we can do if we want to push this a bit further is we can add interesting sort of details to Bob that otherwise wouldn't really be seen and what do I mean about that so taking a look at Bob he's he's cute you know he's all right but maybe I want to Define his his features a bit more maybe I want to give him a face if we look at the material ooh that's looking interesting look at that oh he's all sketchy and cute we can take a look and see what different colors are going to do that's already a pretty good shade I'm pretty happy with that so I'm just going to lower the size here and I'm going to give him a little face just going to do and this really works if you're not going to animate the face like maybe say I want to give him little I don't know we'll give him little whiskers or ooh here's a good idea we can put little little shapes on his his feet can't we boop boop yeah why not doot doot you know little little pause I don't really know what kind of creature o see this is one of those moments where I don't really like how that shade of gray looks against the other ones so let's go back down to the normal I'm going to try and pick a color closer to the area let's say this this purple I want to see that's that's a bit better but it's still too light I think whatever color this dark that dark right there I want to see what that is it can be kind of interesting so it appears that this dark is actually this really bright cyan but if we look at the material yeah it's like a different different tone entirely and we bring it over here and see it's all different again it's really interesting to see what the computer thinks of these colors like how it interprets them but that's just part part of the game isn't it boop boop all right you got a little toes what does that look like oh that's cute we'll give you little little blushes unless we just want those to be your eyes no I'll uh uh let's go back I would rather have uh how about this this color no no doesn't show up enough all right this color it is there we go there we go that's looking cute so now we've given him little details on his face so now that we've done all of that there's just one last thing that we can do to take our little Bob friend to the next level so we I can hear you asking what about colors cuz these are not the colors that Bob is going to be this is just us telling the computer what shade to do Bob but if we want to change the color of Bob we're going to need to add a new fill layer and this is very easy we don't need to worry about this let's just add a new fill layer make sure that that it's above your normal layer we're going to change this one to normal as well and we're going to change our view of it from looking at normal to base color and right now it's filled with this gray we're going to go down we're going to delete everything so make sure to get rid of all these little check marks except for the color since this is going to be our color layer you can see for a moment there when normal was activated it got rid of Bob's nice beautiful normal map and that is why it's so important to check off these things because right here this is saying that this fill layer has information on the normal map but we don't want it to we just want it to have information on the color layer just like how this layer only has information on the normal map so now we can add any kind of pre-existing thing that we want to this if we want to do a cool material we can if we want to do just a base color we can I'm going to try and give Bob let's see what is this yeah perfect beautiful little green skin how lovely and we can also oh well actually I don't I don't like that I don't like that as much let's just make him that's cute yeah we'll do that and we can add a paint layer to this so and we'll change it from normal to color because we don't want it to have normal information I'll change it to Pink and I'll just go in and I like to color with the basic brushes I'll go in I'll make this pink little pink blushies it's okay if it's messy and there we go there's our little friend now that we've done that we have our color we have our normal map we want to export these textures I'm going to rename this to Bob color and I'm going to go up to file then I'm going to export textures now this is going to do a few different things and we want to make sure that our settings are right because it can really mess up our stuff if they're not first off I like to go to Output no where is it yeah here it is the output template and we are going to go to uh what is it I don't actually know what is the thing this one this is the thing we want to change the okay now that we're in export textures we're going to go and we're going to change the padding to dilation plus transparent and this is super important for Maya because Maya creates its UV maps with all of this empty space but painter likes to export it out as having like colors so it will like weirdly stretch it out so change it to dilation plus transparent and then we're just going to look at our list of exports and that's fine we'll export this export successfully I like to open the output directory so we can take a look at this there's a lot of other ones in here because I've been doing a lot of other things in here this is the project folder I like to do new folder substance oh I have to choose a different name that's dumb wait oh well there's already a substance folder in here so never mind so we go into my substance folder and I only need two of these files we need Bob color base and we need Bob color normal but I like to do the one that has the blue background because for some reason that one just looks better so now we've got those in our project folder there's a last step to this to really make our colors pop and that's in Photoshop so I'm going to go into Photoshop and I'm going to open some files so now in Photoshop we're going to go to our project folder demo we're going to go into substance and I'm going to open both of these files here they are here is our normal map nice and sketchy and colorful and beautiful there his cute little face and here is the base color so if we did this just on its own it would look okay but we can make it look better I'm going to take this image I'm going to copy it and I'm going to paste it into the normal map and I'm going to change this layer's information from normal all the way down to color and now it's done something interesting it's using the information from the normal map to change this into darker and lighter shades of green and what's really nice is that it has the exact same paint Strokes as our normal map so I'm going to file export export ads PNG make sure it's 248 and 248 in width and height export and I'm just going to go into my demo into my substance folder and I'm going to replace the base color with this new file and so you can just select Bob color base color and click save it'll say do you want to replace it yes make sure you replace the base color file not the normal map file all right now that all of that is done we can finally go back to Bob and give him his beautiful colors now you can do this with any Shader for this example I'm going to use the AI tune Shader because that is what we did for my Capstone project so we're going to go down to Arnold we're going to go to AI tune Oh but before we do anything I'm going to make sure I do this first uh we want to go into our render settings because there are some settings that we want to change just to be sure yeah uh 1080 you want to go into the Arnold renderer you want to go to filter and instead of gsan which is the base filter that it'll be in you want to change it to Contour this is how you get the best result out of your AI tune Shader make sure that the Contour filter is set so we'll close that now we'll go back to our AI tune and we'll we'll change the name right away cuz you never want to leave your file named the basic file and I'll say Bob color well okay I'll name it Bob texture because oh gosh can I spell gosh texture there we go and we're going to go to Bas base in AI tune controls the color so we're going to go to Color we'll select file image name and now we're going to go into our substance folder in here and we'll do base color open and now we're going to do the same thing but for some reason this gets a bit tricky so go to Maya create a new file node connect the out color to the normal camera and just like this one this one is going to be our normal open and that's it that's like all you have to do I'll make these look a little bit nicer there we go so as you can see file one our normal map is connected to the normal camera this one our base color image is connected to the base color of the Bob texture so let's take a look and see what it looks like on Bob right now we're going to do Arnold lights I'll just do a Skydome light that's the easiest way of taking a look at this Arnold render oh right we actually have to I'm sorry we have to put it on assign existing material Bob texture now let's take a look oh there he is there's our friend hello Bob Bob is looking pretty snazzy he's got his little face he's got all these things on them you can see our painted texture is now on Bob and there's a few benefits to doing this texture for one since all those paint Strokes exist on the normal map it'll actually change dynamically with the color so Bob's color will change slightly as the lighting around him changes we can do a few things to make Bob look better one thing is we can add a tone map and we're going to do that that to Bob's base collar so in the AI tune texture we're going to go to base we're going to go tone map and then we're going to select this ramp and this ramp is like a gradients on Bob oh don't show this message I hate it when it says that and we can change this to whatever color we want I like purple we'll change it to purple you can see it's adding a little bit of purple on the bottom of them maybe make get a little bit more blue yeah do that and we'll change this and we'll make it maybe this color you can see it really really changes it the closer it is to White the nicer it is there we go and that's always interesting to look at you see it adds just a little little touch of interesting color to Bob there's other things we can do like we can change the edge color or change other things the stylized highlight or the rim lighting is also really interesting well I hope that you found this demo to be helpful I really like how Bob came out here he's got some interesting shading going on with him that is how you do the normal map paint Le Style on a character or any object really I hope that you take this and use it in your own projects and that you have fun with it

Channel: Arilizart

Views: 10,342

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Id: oYrSmUXWFHw

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023