Substance Painter 2021 Getting Started - Part 01 - Materials & masking

[Music] in this first video we're going to take a look at creating our project working with basic materials and creating masks let's get started by creating our substance painter project so i'll start by going to file and choosing new now in the new project window i want to make sure that the template is set to pbr metallic roughness i can choose it here from the drop down for the file i need to hit the select button and i'm going to choose the 3d model that i want to build my substance painter project from so i'll click select so here i'm in spiderbot geometry and i'm going to choose the spiderbot.fbx so i'll click open and so now we've loaded in the geometry file now next we're going to set the document resolution now i'm going to start this off with a value of 2048. substance painter is non-destructive so we can actually change this later but for now let's just go with 2048 i will leave everything else at the default and then click ok substance painter is now loading the scene and here we go we have our project now would be a great time to go ahead and save the project so i'll go to file save as and here we can save the project you can see that the save type is a dot spp for substance painter project and we will click save alright so here we have substance painter and we have our project and we're ready to go you can see here that the prominent view is the 3d view and we need to learn how to navigate this to start so if you hold down the alt key and use your left mouse button you can orbit the 3d view in order to pan the 3d view hold down the alt key and use your middle mouse button now i can pan the view to zoom in and out i want to hold down the alt key my right mouse button move up and down to zoom in and out and that's how we can navigate our 3d view now you'll also notice here that the 3d view is lit so it is actually lit by what we refer to as an environment map so let's come over here to the far right side on the ui and you'll see there's a button and it's called display settings i'm going to click this button and you can see that this panel appears now the first tab is the environment settings tab and if we look you can see here that we do have a map and a button so if we take a look at this opacity slider i'm going to set this all the way to 100 and then i'm going to take this blur and set this all the way to zero here you can see that environment map that i was talking about this is a high dynamic range image that substance painter uses to light the 3d view and if we want to change the lighting direction we simply need to just change the environment rotation and i can do that by adjusting the slider you can see here that as i adjust or rotate the environment the lighting changes we can more clearly visualize this by enabling our shadows and then rotating our environment now a better way to work with this environment rotation is to use a keyboard shortcut so if i hold down the shift key use my right mouse button left to right you can see that i can rotate the environment now like i said if we want to change the lighting we could simply click this button here and then choose a different hdr map so for example if i choose something like this cave entry forest we get a completely different lighting setup here all right so what i'm going to do for this course i'm going to switch this back to the default panorama and i'm going to set the opacity setting all the way to zero and for now i'm going to disable the shadows alright so that's how we can navigate our 3d scene as well as rotate our environment lighting we'll use this environment rotation keyboard shortcut quite a lot as we work through our project so let's just continue taking a tour around the substance painter ui so here at the top right you'll notice that we have our texture set list in substance painter a texture set represents the materials you assign to the mesh in your 3d application each individual material becomes a texture set with its own dedicated layer stack and channels when you export each texture set results in a set of bitmap files with a file for every channel of the set i can enable and disable texture sets by just clicking the eye icon now right below the texture set we have our layer stack this is where we're going to do all of the work as we build up our textures and materials each texture set has its own layer stack and it also has its own set of well settings under the texture set settings is where we can do things like access the resolution for the set so like i said painters non-destructive we can actually move up and down this resolution stack here we can also set a different shader instance or if i scroll down we can add additional channels here to work with the shader materials can be broken down into individual channels each channel represents a material property like color metallic or roughness fill layers can act as a material in the layer stack as they can fill one or more channels with a texture or a uniform value now since we're already in the texture set settings i'll continue to scroll down and you'll notice that we have this section called mesh maps this is where i can bake a set of maps baking is a step where you save or bake geometry information from your mesh into texture maps baking is not a requirement but it can speed up your texturing process a lot the information stored inside your bait maps is used to create procedural effects like wear or dirt and it can even help with your material placement so now that we understand that baking maps can help aid us in the texturing process let's go ahead and do that here for this particular project so i'm going to click the bake mesh maps button a dialog here appears now for the output size i'm going to go ahead and set this to 2048. now on the left side is where i can enable and disable bakers now in this project i do not need the thickness baker and i do not need the normal baker so we're just going to use this set of bakers and i'm actually going to leave everything at the default state to keep things simple however i do need to make a change to my id baker so i click the baker you can see here that it navigates here to the settings for the id baker and the color source is set to material color by default for this project i created vertex colors in my 3d application by adding a color value to the vertices that make up a 3d mesh i did this so that i can place materials on the model by simply choosing a color value so in order to accomplish this i need to set the color source here to vertex color the id baker when set to vertex color will render the vertex color data from the mesh into a 2d image now i want to stress that working with vertex colors is not a requirement i'm just showcasing a common workflow in substance painter which allows me to place materials quickly i can manually place materials on the mesh if i do not want to use an id map i can set the color source for any texture set here in the bake options here we have the body set and we also have access to the legs so instead of having to go and choose the legs and setting additional settings i'm just going to hit apply to all this means that the color source of vertex color is applied both to the body and the legs texture sets that you see here so now all this is set up all i need to do is now come over and hit bake selected textures this is going to bake all of the textures for both the body and the legs texture sets and you can see it actually is a pretty quick process here in substance painter we're already completed so here i'll click ok and if we look at the body now underneath our mesh maps you can see that these mesh maps have been added to the appropriate input slots also if i select the legs texture set you can see that the bake maps that are associated with the likes texture set have already been set here as well all right so let's jump back here to the body and that takes care of the texture set settings and the baking process now as we start to work you'll notice that we have this properties panel this is a context sensitive property that's going to update depending if i'm working with a brush or if i'm working with a fill layer as we'll discuss a little later on so directly below our 3d view we can see our shelf so the shelf is just a library of content that we ship with substance painter it gives you things like grunge maps alpha stamps as well as various types of brushes that you can use in your projects we're going to grab and use content from the shelf as we build up our materials and textures however one thing i like to do is i like to undock the shelf so all of the panels that we've been discussing here can actually be undocked and they can be repositioned to build up your own version of the ui so here in my case what i like to do here at the shelf tab i'm just going to left click and drag to tear this off and i'm going to park it over here on the left side of the ui you can see that it opens up as i move my mouse over i'll let go of my mouse and now the shelf just snaps in as applied to the left side of the view i feel like this is a lot better because now you can see that i have a more maximized or complete 3d view it's not being split in half and it just makes things a little bit easier to work with and like i said now here we have our shelf if we go over to say something like our materials we have a set of material presets and we'll start to use those here in just a bit and speaking of these material presets let's go ahead and start building our first material this is the body texture set this is where we're going to start and i'm going to come over here to the layers tab and i'm going to start to build some layers now by default you'll see that we have this layer one it's already created for you every time you create a new project and this is a paintable layer there are two types of layers in substance painter a paintable layer and a fill layer we'll get to both as we progress through the course but this paintable layer you can see i can just actually paint directly here on the 3d mesh okay so let me undo that and we're not actually going to start here with this paintable layer so i can just delete it i don't need it and we're going to start with a fill layer a fill layer can represent a material which allows me to fill channels with values to produce a material so let's start here by just using this button to add a group this is just a layer group and i'm going to double click and i'm going to name this color 0 1 because we're going to have this kind of two-tone color material and now i can start to add or build content within this layer group so i add the layer group just for organizational purposes also it's pretty handy when we get into masking as you'll see we're able to use a layer group to mask a whole set of layers all right so let's jump back over here to our shelf we were talking about material presets we have our materials category here and what i'm going to do is here in the search field i'm going to do a search for plastic and you can see that you know it starts to filter the content and here is a material preset that i want to work with called plastic glossy pure i'm going to left click and drag and drop this material into the layer group and you can see that a fill layer is created as indicated by the paint bucket icon on the layer and so now if we take a look here at my properties panel the properties panel is context sensitive so it's going to update with properties based on what you have selected in my case it's a fill layer so i have the options here to set things like my projection and scale of the layer as well as set the material properties which is what i want to do first and you can see here that i have some core channels enabled by default color rough and metal and this is going to be perfectly what i need so for the base color i can come in and click this button this gives me a color picker and then i can just choose some color values so say i want to do something like this there we go i've changed the color now right below it is the roughness channel so what we get by default is this slider this uniform slider and a black value is going to equal like highly reflective like a mirror and as we start to move this slider towards white you can see that we start to diffuse the reflection so here we have this uniform slider for basically controlling how reflective the surface is going to be and then right below that we have our metallic slider so if we have this set at a value of black black meaning no metal and if we set this here to a value of white we get what looks like a metal value so in this case with the combination of this particular color in metal this looks like i have some type of brass material okay so for here we're going to set this all the way back to zero and i'm going to open up the color picker once more here on the right i have an image that contains a set of color swatches i can click the eyedropper on the color picker to sample color values using left click and drag i can sample any values underneath the eyedropper here i'm going to sample a swatch from my texture you can find this image in the spiderbot textures folder swatches.png and so i'm going to choose this value and that is how i'm going to set my color value so previously we were talking about this roughness slider and how it's just this uniform slider but that's that's pretty boring so what i'd like to do is basically augment or change this value or drive it based on a grunge or a roughness map so what i can do i'm going to jump over here to my shelf let me hit this x button to close out my search and if we look at grunges you can see that we have all these grunge materials that we ship with substance painter so i can grab one of these grunge maps i can left click and just drag and drop and place it right here on the button and that will apply this grunge map so you can see that we're already starting to break up that highlight based on this procedural material another way that you can work with this let me just hit this x button here to get rid of that is i can click the button itself and this opens up what we refer to as the mini shelf it's just a miniaturized version of our shelf and i can come over here to the resources tab and i can start to do a search so i'm going to search for grunge rough you can see it filters through the list and i'm going to start here with this map this is grunge rough dirty this is actually a pretty good one that i use often so now that i've filtered the result i can just left click on it to apply it here so what we've done is we've taken a procedural texture and we've applied it here to the roughness channel of our fill layer so to get an idea of what this is doing under the hood let's come up to our 3d view i'll click this drop down and here i'm going to choose the roughness channel so here you can see again what we've done we've taken a grayscale texture and we've applied it to here to this roughness channel and this is what it looks like now we have some controls here since this is a procedural texture we can make some changes here to the balance and the contrast and we'll do that in just a bit but for right now i want to come over here to the properties i'm going to hit this button here which allows me to take a look at the projection and scale settings so at this point we've taken a 2d procedural noise and we've applied it to a 3d mesh if i come up here to the top of my ui i'm going to switch this here to my 3d 2d split view this allows me to see the uv layout here for my body texture set and you can see here that we have all these uv shells and they're rotated in different ways and when we apply a texture like this you can see that well everything's moving in all these different directions based on the layout of the uvs of course the texture doesn't look like it's uniformly applied and we're also definitely going to get some seams so a good way to work around this is to come over here to our projection mode and change this from uv projection to this option called tri-planar projection so when i do that it's going to take this texture and it's going to re-project it in 3d space so that's why we have this 3d manipulator here in our 3d view and you can see that already the texture looks like it's been mapped uniformly now because again it's being projected across the x y and z axes also the main benefit of this is that we're not going to get any seams so we don't have to worry about you know aligning our uv shells okay so with that said i'm going to jump back over here to just my 3d only view and now i'm going to come over here to the scale because this is a procedural noise it's completely seamless so i can actually tile this across the surface by introducing a higher scale value so in my case i'm going to set this to a value of 2 and so now this seems to more appropriately match the scale of my uv layout now again i can scroll down and i can start to tweak some of these parameters so for example for this balance here i want to set this to a value of 0.4 and here for the contrast i want to set this to a value of 0.14 so i'll just type in .14 hit enter to lock that in this grayscale grunge map simulates the micro surface imperfections of the material like scratches and dents which scatter light rays that hit the surface to produce variation and diffusion in the highlights okay so let's look at the result of this grayscale procedural noise we're looking at it in the roughness channel let's jump over here to our material channel and now here you can see if i zoom in close i'm going to hold down the shift key right mouse button left to right to kind of move my lighting around this is always really important when you start to work with your roughness we want to see how that lighting is being broken up by that roughness information so now you can see that we get this kind of subtle detail in the roughness and we get a more realistic result the appearance of our roughness value is affected by our shader quality settings i'm going to go to the shader settings and by default the quality is set to low 16 samples per pixel this low setting may not give you the precision needed to accurately match the roughness values computed in real time 3d applications by setting the quality to high 64 samples per pixel you provide more samples for the shader to produce a higher fidelity result the goal is to set a shader quality setting in painter that matches as close as possible to the 3d program you are using this way you can correctly gauge roughness values in painter and know they will react similar in other 3d applications now i no longer need this 3d manipulator it's kind of getting in the way so at the top of the ui here i can just come over to this far left button and click it here to disable or hide the manipulator all right so at this stage we already have a pretty basic material it's just using a single layer which is a fill layer we've set a color we've set a procedural noise here for our grunge however i'd like to maybe add just a little bit more nuance here to this material so this time i'm going to add a filter to help me do that so with the layer selected here at the top of the layer stack i can click this add effect button so i'll click this button in the drop down we have this option here for filters so i'm going to add a filter you can see that it's added a filter to my fill layer now i just need to well choose a filter so if i come over to the shelf and i click the filters this is all the filters that we ship with substance painter so i could find what i want left click and drag it to the button however it's always best just to use the mini shelf so we'll click the button you can see that it's already context sensitive it's filtering well for filters and what i'm going to do here is just i'm going to do a search here for galvanized i'll start to type that in and we have a specific matte finish filter called galvanized this is really good when you're working with kind of metal materials so i'm going to left click to add this filter and already you can start to see that well something's happening here in our 3d view we're starting to add some additional information now this filter is added information to the normal channel so if i click my drop down here and i choose normal you can see that we have this normal data the rgb components correspond to the x y and z coordinates respectively of the surface normal it is used for faking the lighting of bumps and dents so now i'm just going to drop back to the material mode by just pressing the m key on the keyboard so now just as with anything we want to start to you know tweak some of these values so here for the scale i'm going to set this to a value of 9 and then for the flake's intensity you know we're going to use a pretty low value for this so i'm going to type in .07 and then hit enter and there we go so we just want kind of a nice subtle effect again we'll zoom in pretty close let's check our lighting shift right mouse button left to right and you can see this filter adds another level of variation as it breaks up the lighting across the surface so at this stage we have our material and it's applied to the entire body of the robot however i would like to restrict this material to a specific area on the robot and to do that we are going to rely on a mask a mask is a grayscale texture that is used to reveal or hide the contents of a layer white in your mask means that the area will be visible black will be invisible masks are a key part of the workflow in substance painter they can be painted manually or generated based on baked maps with masking you can work smart and efficient creating even more complex materials so now let's create a mask i'm going to create a mask on the layer group so that all the layers contained within this group will be masked i'm going to click the add mask button and choose to add a black mask this creates a black mask which completely masks the entire material so as you can see we no longer see the material on the surface of our robot now i need to create the mask and i can do that through various methods first let's take a look at painting a mask so you'll notice here that the mask is selected as indicated by this light blue outline this means that i can start to paint directly in this mask however that's not the best way to work i would recommend coming over here to this add effect so we'll click the button and i'm going to choose to add a paint effect now this gives me a layer within my mask this is a much more flexible way to create a mask so with the paint effect selected i can now come over to my shelf and i'm going to choose my brushes option and you can see here that i'm going to use this basic hard brush as a preset so now if i come over to the 3d view i can just start to paint and here you can see that i'm painting with a white value and this reveals or unmask the material now i know that i'm painting with a white value because if i take a look at the properties here we have these tabs the first tab here is giving me things like my brush settings but if i take a look at this grayscale tab on the far right this allows me to set the value that i'm going to be painting in my case like i said white now if i set this value here to black black giving me transparency and i start to paint i'm basically masking or hiding the material now we can toggle between these two views pretty quickly by just tapping the x key on the keyboard so i'll tap x i get the white value i am revealing the material i tap x again i get the black value and now i'm masking the material so this is one way that we can create a mask we can just simply paint it so i'm going to give you a second option for masking now we did create this paint layer and i mentioned that this is the best way to work and the reason for that is with this paint you can see that i can come in and i can actually name this so i can call this painted mask now i have a name i know what this is actually represents i also have a set of blending modes so as i create multiple paint layers within this mask i can combine them using blending modes i can also play around with the layer opacity here so again you just get more flexibility now in my case i actually don't want to use this mask so i'm just going to disable it by clicking the eye icon so let's add another mask so here you can see the process i select the mask it's outlined in blue i go to add effect and i'm going to choose another paint now with this selected instead of using my paint brush i'm going to come over here to my toolbar and i'm going to choose the polygon fill tool so i select it here in the properties i now have some options the two options you'll work with is mesh fill and uv fill so you can see here with object selected and with the value of white i can click any area that represents a mesh part on the 3d model so simple click and it completely fills that mesh part with the value that i have set so again white i'm now revealing the material i'll hit ctrl z to undo that and now let's take a look here at my 3d 2d split view now the other option that is useful is the uv fill so i'll select the option again i'm setting this as a white value and i can just fill based on one of these uv shells so for example if i click the body we fill based on that uv shell i can click here in the 2d view or the 3d view so let me name this paint effect polygon fill and i'm going to take my view back to my 3d only view and so now let's just look at a third option so here i'm going to come back to my effect once more and this time i'm going to add a color selection you can see the color selection is set to the id mask that we baked at the very beginning of this video this is also going to show the reason why we're using this id mask so now what i can do is simply come over here to pick color the id map is now shown in my 3d view and i can simply come over here to the 3d view using the eyedropper and choose a color where i want to mask so in my case here i'm going to choose this green for the body and here we have our mask created for us by just simply clicking the color value in some cases when you're creating your own 3d models it may be more easy for you to select polygons or vertices in the 3d application assign a vertex color that you can bake to an id map to make tricky selections a lot easier here in substance painter but as you can see we have the flexibility and we have these three options that i've showcased here that allow you to quickly create masks here in substance painter in our case we're going to use the color selection so i'm just going to remove these other options that we demoed i'm going to come over and click the x button to just delete those as a bonus i wanted to also showcase the geometry mask which was added in substance painter 2021.1 the geometry mask will allow me to mask based on mesh parts so instead of creating a layer mask i can enable the geometry mask by simply clicking this thumbnail in the properties i can see the mesh parts that make up this model i can then disable or mask mesh parts by clicking on them in the 3d view now when i click on the layer icon you can see i have created a mask for my layer by disabling mesh parts if your 3d mesh is divided into multiple parts using the geometry mask provides a quick method for creating masks without having to bake ids or hand paint which method you choose all comes down to your workflow and preference the good news is that substance painter offers multiple methods for masking to suit your needs this is going to conclude part one we created our project baked maps created material applied filters and grunge maps and discussed masking take some time to practice what we've covered thus far and when you're ready join me in part two where we will continue building materials

Channel: Adobe Substance 3D

Views: 143,004

Rating: 4.9499478 out of 5

Keywords: materials, procedural, PBR, Physically based rendering, Scans, Photogrammetry, scanning, environment art, 3D support, 3D design, 3D painting, 3D texturing, realistic, hyper-realistic, texturing, 3D material

Id: _j27AS0VQOw

Length: 27min 26sec (1646 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021