Substance Painter for Beginners Tutorial

you asked for it and I'm delivering like FedEx baby welcome to my substance painter for beginners tutorial in the video coming up what's going on you texturing Titans this is Jo musi and today we are talking about substance painter and how a beginner could actually get started when I first started 3d modeling I really struggled with texturing and that led to a unhealthy relationship with 3d modeling so what do I mean by that well I used to 3d model way too many details in hopes of avoiding texturing and while I actually got me better or really good at modeling I really suffered in the texturing part because I didn't really push myself and for a while I was just texturing in Photoshop and I was okay at it and that was really the main option for 3d artists looking at texture of the models was Photoshop fast forward today we have a package like substance painter and when I think about substance painter I think about dramatic improvement in my texturing in a very short amount of time so I picked up substance painter in a couple of days I got the work flow I got the hang of it by no means that I master it but I got good enough to just jump in there throwing a model texture it and even render it with an IRA and get really really good results way better than I had in previous years or attempts just doing a deal school Maia - Photoshop so in a nutshell substance painter was a game changer for the amount of improvement that I made in a very short time to my finished 3d artworks so without further ado let's get on with the video so let's get started with this substance painter introduction for beginners and for this tutorial I'm not gonna cover the whole interface meaning I'm only gonna show you the things that are most important and that I use on a daily basis within substance painter I could go ahead and show you every single feature but that probably a three or four hour tutorial right so I want to get you going from zero to sixty as fast as possible so I'm gonna show you my workflows and the things that I deem are most important when first learning substance painted I'm gonna go to file and I'll go to new and here all these things can be changed on the fly but I want to go ahead and have a 2k document resolution and then we're gonna leave this at PBR metallic roughness that's fine so I'll go to file here and I'll go to select and you'll have two of these files and I'll show you exactly what they're for here but this is actually gonna be a used to generate ID map but for now we're gonna start with the Mex fear and we're gonna hit open and we'll hit OK alright now we have our model loaded and the first thing that we should have figure out how to do is actually navigate so to navigate and if you're coming from my they should feel pretty similar we're gonna hold alt and left click and we're gonna orbit we're gonna hold down Alt + middle mouse to pan alt and right click to zoom in and out and just like in Maya if we're right here off in space and we hit the shortcut F we're gonna frame on our object okay so let's go ahead and take a brief quick look at the interface itself right here we have our tools including our brush our eraser or poly on paper here we have a lot of tools here we're gonna cover that in a second but just like Photoshop it's docked right here on the left hand side and then towards the bottom we have our shelf that allows us to pull in assets in and out from substance painter go to all here we'll see pretty much all the assets or information that we could use within substance painter and I'm gonna cover some of these not every single one so here's our alphas alphas can be used within brushes I use them a lot to actually stamp in hide information and we're actually going to do that in a little bit textures these are pretty much any textures that you bring in that you create or that you import these are actually gonna be propagated here that we have filters filters are just basically effects like in Photoshop that you could just use to manipulate and just add more effects or complexity to your materials brushes pretty self-explanatory just like Photoshop you have presets and just like most packages you could actually create your own import save them out particles particles are actually just effects they actually deal with particles and physics to give you paint strokes or effects based on real-world simulation I really don't use these too much but they're definitely an option if you want to explore sometimes certain effects can be hard to recreate with a brush and that's when these effects actually come in handy materials are just your basic materials just like any other package smart materials are just materials with more effects and these are usually the ones that you see with the edge where the grunge and all those cool little effects that substance is known for these smart materials when set up properly are the ones to drive those smart masks kind of go along with smart materials but these are the masks that drive or that can drive some of the more complex effects within your materials environments so environments if you look at this background here right and if we do shift and right click we're actually orbiting or we're rotating this environment sphere and these images are actually driving to lighting right so if we want to go ahead and change this we could just drag and click and you see that this is going to be updated and now if we orbit this color or this image information is actually going to be affecting our materials as well a side note on environments you want to be careful especially when building your materials within substance and especially if you're gonna be creating or rendering in another package or you working in a team environment you know don't go with something so extreme because if you're building your material or solely based on this environment you might overcompensate take it into a package like Maya and then you know you're you know if you have neutral lighting compared to this this is gonna look completely different so I like to use this panorama here this is pretty much the default one but from time to time I do like this basically compare it with a studio setup and the studio setup just introduces lighting but has no color information okay that's pretty much the Shelf in a nutshell at least the more important features that I use more often side note is it does have a filter feature here so if foreign environments and we type in panorama right we set panorama pops up but if we go to maybe alphas and we type in panorama right it's not gonna come up so just be weary of whatever you click here is gonna add a filter but if you're in that subfolder and you know you're not paying attention you might not find which needs so just when in doubt clear the filter if you know something by name or just know what folder and habits before actually trying to do the filter search so let's go ahead and take a look at the right-hand side of the screen this right here is gonna reflect whatever you name your shading group with in Maya so not you're actually material but your shading group within ayuh or really whatever package you're importing from okay now if we had multiple materials applied to this object they would actually show up right here but right now we're just working since it's a simpler object we're only working with one material right here we have layers we have no information so let's go ahead and add some information right so we have two main types of layers we have a regular layer and we have a fill layer right so a fill layer just the best easiest way to think about it is just a solid color and then a regular layer it's just like a blank layer within Photoshop where you can paint with a brush and actually add information so let's go ahead add a fill you'll see that this is solid indicating that this is a fill and here we have a lot of information now the thing about substance is that we could actually work on all these different parameters at one time or we could actually work on separate ones right so whatever we had clicked on that's what we're actually gonna work on right so for example if we go here to our color right and we want to change this you see that now this is being filled and color is the only thing that's being added by this filling right so we don't have any height we don't have any roughness we don't have any metal nosov any normal information being so we could actually check them on or check them off and you see that they're added here or take it away right let's go ahead and just leave this to color and then what I'll do here is I will add a regular layer right and for this one I'm actually gonna paint some height information right so I'm gonna go ahead and get my brush from the left hand side and you see as I'm painting here we have a couple of things happening right we have this white stroke so this white stroke is being controlled by this right here right so if we wanted to paint with a different color right we would just come in here now we see our stroke color has changed so what we could do let's actually undo this one and we'll just paint with the red right so we'll just paint this X here so now this layer is contributing all these channels right here so let's go ahead and take both of these and let's only work with color and height so we have color information but we don't have any height information that's because the height is actually being driven by this slot right so if we go ahead and decrease this it's not gonna update our stroke but if we undo this stroke right and then we go ahead and put this height down now it's actually gonna dig in right so now you see that we're actually painting with color and height information okay so let's go ahead and add some roughness right so what does roughness actually describe right well roughness is basically gonna dictate how shiny or how rough is the actual surface so as roughness goes up the amount of shininess is gonna go down and vice versa so if we go ahead and basically put this all the way down to zero we start painting and what I'm gonna do here right is paint with this stroke and we see how shiny that is right because this stroke right here has zero roughness right while this one had a little bit of roughness this one has nothing right so as we paint we see how shiny that is right so on the flip side if we come here and we drive roughness all the way up what do you think is gonna happen so our new stroke it's gonna be very very dull so that's pretty much wood roughness drives and that's how you can control if it's being applied or not onto your lighters okay metalness works a little bit similar but it describes how metal a object actually is okay so let's go ahead and do this I'm gonna go ahead and delete this layer right and let's go ahead and add a new layer okay and now we're just gonna work with a metal mess by itself so if we activate it all the way to one you see that we're actually painting metallic information onto our material right and then if we go ahead and go all the way to zero we're going back to a matte surface that is not metallic at all normal information works very similar to hide information so I'm not really going to dive into that but it's just basically going to add normal information and then hide information could actually be converted into a normal map or a normal information as well right so these actually work are very simple so that's pretty much the the five main components that you can paint all together at one time or you could actually paint separately so let's take a deeper look into layers and I'm gonna go ahead and just delete this one so we could hit the delete button here I'm gonna go ahead add another layer here and I'm gonna show you a little bit about the blending modes they're working exactly like Photoshop so if you work with Photoshop even a package like these should actually be similar so we're gonna go ahead and just work with color here we're gonna go ahead and get a black color here and then we'll just go ahead and paint so we'll go ahead and paint this here and then we can just change the opacity right it's just like a Photoshop we could go ahead and do that we could hide and unhide by clicking the eyeball we could also change the effect so we could you know a lot of times artists use the multiply suppose you're working with darker tones works the same way so we could set a layer to multiply and maybe you can go ahead and just play with the opacity and down that down you could actually group our layers together as well so we can select both of these we can right click and we can go ahead and create a group and now this is a group and we have layers within that group and this group will basically control the layers underneath let's go ahead and delete all these one last thing about layers here before I delete this let me undo the grouping here I'm gonna go ahead and delete this let's talk about asking just on a basic level if we wanted to work in a non-destructive fashion we could actually work with a mask right so I'm gonna go ahead and right click here I'm gonna add a white mask okay so white is gonna reveal and then black is gonna hide whatever are your fill layers or whatever your layer is right I'm gonna go back to white mask right so now I'm gonna have to just tweak this mask itself right so I'm gonna use a black brush here and you see that with this I'm actually just erasing right I'm taking away just by using this black mask right if we had an alpha right so maybe we wanted to stamp out something from this so what we could do is just add a little bit of complexity here we can go to our materials we can add a metal so I'm gonna search for metal so we'll go to iron or raw damage supply that we see that this is being applied and this might look a little bit off keep in mind we haven't baked our maps yet but that's fine so for now what I'll do is I'm gonna go ahead and drop this here towards the top and we have that mask we could just go in here and obviously why it's not gonna help us since this is already filled but if we go to our brush and just change the color to black right you see that this is being changed so now we can go ahead and erase and we're gonna reveal what's underneath right if we wanted to have something more precise what we could do instead of just you know manually doing this well maybe we could use one of those alphas that I talked about earlier right so how will we do this well you see within the brush we have this shape here which we can click and we can go ahead and just select any of these out so now we're gonna have a alpha here that we can just basically paint with right since we need a little bit more control let's talk about the actual brush controls right so here you can control the brush just like in Photoshop you can control the size so you could do it within this brush slider here right the one thing about this is that we can actually control this on the fly so if we hold on control and then with right click we scrub left to right you see that I'm changing the size on the fly right the other thing that we could actually change on the fly as well is if we control and left-click and we move up and down we see that we're controlling the angle on this right or the rotation of this alpha or really just any brush so control up and down is gonna change the angle on this but control left and right is gonna change the flow right if we bring this down we're gonna bring down the flow of this and we're gonna get a more muted effect if it's on 15 versus if it's on a hundred you can go in here and then we can go ahead and just start basically carving it in right now we're just working with color so we can actually introduce height here height since it is on a fill layer right and this is actually updating the mask you will actually see the changes update here so we could actually go ahead and push down right now we're not only working with the Alpha here but we're actually working with the height information we can go back to our layer okay and one note about fill layers if you're ever gonna fill there and this needs to happen to me a lot if you have that selected it won't let you paint so make sure that if you want to paint you actually have to be on a mask or you could actually right-click and add a paint layer to this right but if you're just on a fill layer you won't be able to actually paint over if it's not giving you the brush you know just don't try to fight it just make sure that you're actually painting on the right thing so I could go back in here I can maybe take this guy and then maybe flip this and maybe I can go ahead and scale this down a little bit and now we're just adding more texture information on there like that okay so that's a little bit about the brushes so now that we have some color information here let's actually look at the split view and that's going to enable us to actually dissect a couple more options here by default to bring your UV layout or your texture set view right just at that flat 2d image you could actually go here if you click this button here right now we're on 40 only but we could actually look at 3d / 2d you see the shortcut is f1 if you need to access that via the shortcut but now we're actually taking a look at the you know the 2d image here the actual texture set so the cool thing about substance is that and this actually is you know depending on you UV layout but we could actually paint here but we could actually paint on the back so texture set itself as we update or rotate this environment sphere you see that this is actually gonna be updated as well right so we could you know add it here and you see that it's being updated here or we could just add it here and you see that it's gonna be out of here like I said sometimes it's gonna be easier to paint on your model itself sometimes it's gonna be easier to paint on your texture set and this is really just the cleaner your UV layout is this is gonna be easier for you right using this option just really depends on what you're actually trying to paint so now that we have these two views available the brush is actually gonna behave a little bit different depending on what or how you actually tell it to behave meaning if we go here to our brush settings we see that we have a couple options if we scroll down so the alignment okay we can tell it to align to the camera so however the the cameras aligned well this this brush is actually gonna be aligned right if we go here to the UV well this is gonna be aligned perfectly with the UVs right so maybe if you want to paint with trees they have more precision you probably want to have the alignment set to UV versus set to camera or tangent tender wrap is gonna just wrap around the tangents this is gonna basically use the camera Torian and this is gonna be basically aligned with your you v's ok so just keep that in mind if you're not getting the right like you wanted or if you're clicking something and the scales are off you know you could definitely play what play with this and get the one that you actually need I'm gonna leave this at a tangent wrap so let's go to explore the rest of the settings here on the right hand side here we have our display settings and we have these icons here these were basically tabs so we scroll down these are actually gonna change so here's your environment settings by default let's actually go ahead and go back to our 3d view only so by default you might not see your environment sphere and most likely it's because this is set to zero right here right so if you just want to enable it now keep in mind even though this is set to zero you're still getting your color information from your environment it's just basically not showing in your background you can go ahead and Nabal it I like to enable it especially when I'm working and then when I take the renders I like to take it off you can play with the exposure so if you need more exposure you could definitely play with that I normally keep that in one so that yeah that's that environment rotation shift and right click you can change your environment on the fly or you can use the slider but nine times out of ten you just do shift and then scroll left and right with the right mouse button and you'll change that of rotation on the environment sphere environment blur you can go ahead and blur this out if you want it we can come down here we can play around the focal length just like in Maya we have a smaller focal length this is gonna look I'll give you a lot of lens distortion if you want something a lot more flat you just make that a higher amount I'm gonna hit F on the keyboard so you see how orthographic that looks so maybe if that's a look you're going for you can I'm just gonna go ahead and reset that so I'm just gonna set that to 35 and just keep working post effects boy don't play with these too much if you want to get some cool post effects you can put a vignette here you can get a lens distortion glare if you wanted it so just really depends on what your final output of your render you usually play with these more once right during an IRA and I'll cover IRA in a second for now this is pretty much all you need to know about post-effects I'm just gonna turn those off here's subsurface scattering anti aliasing pretty self-explanatory you could activate this here if you want to put a subsurface scattering on you could enable that but you know obviously for metals I don't really see much of a point but if you had skin that could be useful here's just more viewport settings I really don't play with these that much most of the time the only one that I'm really playing with is the show the wireframe a lot of times especially if I'm doing hard surface modeling or I have a hard surface object and I want to get you know right in the middle of something sometimes it's hard to eyeball but if you have the wireframe enabled and we could definitely go in here and change the color you know if we wanted to have this right in the middle we could actually use that wireframe to our advantage and drop that there you know this is gonna be a lot easier if we show the wireframe versus trying to basically just eyeball alright so moving on down from this right hand side we have the shader settings I really don't play with this either if you're using displacement maps you'll definitely want that enabled so if you want to push and pull in your actual geometry you are looking to create displacement maps or displacement information you know you probably want to come here also all your tessellation if you want to go ahead and enable that this is where you would do it this is your history so the cool thing about substance painter is that it does actually remember all your history in certain cases but just because it actually does this you can go into Maya change your UV layout bring it in here and it's actually gonna apply all this information I've had had a break before but you know I would say about 60 70 percent of the time I'm able to go into Maya change the UV layout Riaan port this and all this history plug back into the new UV layout that is one of the cool things about substance that is pretty unique and that you can actually do change your UV layouts and not lose your whole material or a map information lastly is the log so just like in my if you have issues this is where it's gonna be recorded but just diagnose issues if you need to copy and paste them you could do it if you need to look for a solution you could you know paste that into Google along those lines so let's start the fun part here and actually start texturing this model so the first thing that I'll do is I'm gonna go ahead take this guy here and delete it I'm actually gonna go ahead and delete this as well so we're going to be left with our bare model here the first thing that we actually have to do is bake our textures right and I'll show you why this is important so I'll go to smart material I'll type in paint and I'm gonna go hover over here right this steel painted if you take a look at this thumbnail we see that we have some nice edge wear but the main or the bulk of this material or this thumbnail actually looks painted right and we have just that nice edge wear effect so I'm gonna go ahead and drag this here it's gonna look nothing like the actual thumbnail right and if this ever happened to you this is because all of the powerful effects that smart materials often have is actually driven by these maps right and if we don't have any maps we're not gonna get those effects properly applied to our model so here if we go to our texture set settings we have nothing we haven't baked any maps usually when I get into substance painter this is the first thing that I actually do what we're gonna do here is select bake mesh Maps okay and we have a couple options if we actually just hover over here it's gonna tell you what these maps do I'm gonna tell you right now thickness oh this is a solid object so we don't need to actually make a thickness map but things that are translucent maybe if you have skin that needs subsurface scattering you'll definitely need that but we have a hard surface object so we definitely don't need to bake that map and then normal well we're not bringing any normal information to this model right so if we had a high resolution mesh that we wanted to bake out normal information we would actually leave this checked on and we would bring in that high density mesh right the high res mesh to actually make a normal map right so really just a note what its gonna do it's gonna look at the high-density information right the high it's gonna compare it to the low and it's gonna you know look at the differences and it's gonna basically create a normal map for us but we're actually gonna be creating a normal map a little bit later but right now we actually don't need it and the rest of these we're actually gonna use this right here is gonna create our world space normals ID Maps ID maps are pretty powerful especially for masking sections off especially if you have a lot of smaller objects sometimes it could be easier in the package like Maya to assign different materials to those objects of faces and just create an ID map versus actually doing the breakup with in substance painter right so if we jump to Maya real quick and look at this mess here right this is what actually got exported it's a substance painter originally this guy right here if we hide this this is actually what's gonna help us generate our ID map within substance painter now this is a pretty simple object right but if you have a more complicated scene maybe it's easier for you to actually just apply different materials to different objects components faces right and just export this into substance painter have it generate an ID map for you versus setting everything up or breaking all these up into different masks or different materials within substance painter and you're gonna see this in a second how we actually do it so here back in substance to set the ID map all you have to do is select ID since the material color right that's what we want the color source and then under common here we want to go ahead and bring in this ID right so it's actually the same model it just has the different color IDs right the different material information we'll hit open and this is actually just gonna be used to create our ID map for outputs under common will set this to k-map we could always uh press this as well so you could always change that ambient occlusion pretty self-explanatory is just gonna create a ambient occlusion map I do like to put up the the race just up a little bit you know if you go crazy with this it will increase your render times but you know if you're getting any graininess in your ambient occlusion you could definitely play with this and actually try to clean it up so the curvature map is pretty important within substance painter it's actually what drives a lot of the cool Edgware effects are really just leaving alone for the most part don't really need to change anything if I do or I need to clean this up sometimes what I'll do is I'll play around with the details if I'm not getting a correct baked but usually nine times out of ten I just leave it as default and then right here we also have the position maps I'm gonna leave that checked on and then I'll go to baked metal zero one mesh maps if you have more than one texture set here you actually do have the option making all of them at one time or you could bake them separately but right now we don't have that option because we only have one texture set I'll go ahead and hit bake it's gonna take me through the process if you have a newer version of substance you will see this cool interactive baking process actually take effect I'll hit OK there we go right so now that we actually baked our maps this actually looks exactly like the thumbnail so now this is behaving property let's go ahead and go back to our layers and actually look at how this is being created right especially with the smart materials and this is actually I learned substance painter once I had my Maps baked I would just throw different smart materials on there and kind of just reverse-engineer how they were built and I got a feel on you know a lot of different components and then once I kind of broke it down I was able to create my own smart materials let's look at the paint here first if we just hide this we see that this is just a paint layer right and then it has a like we talked about right and then it looks like we have two separate fills here with different effects let's just go ahead and hide the effects and now we see that we just have a flat paint layer right a flat fill so if we were to go in here and we actually click the mask we see two things that are driving the mask right so we have a warp so all the warp is doing is just adding more distortion to that actual mask so it's actually just giving it a a nice break up and then we have the mask editor right so the mask editor is actually what is controlling this mask here and it really just basing it off the edge where here right so if we go in here we'll take a look and even though we see that there's a bunch of maps plugged in here if we go in here and actually start X and these out there's nothing changing and that's because this mask editor for this effect is actually just using the curvature right so if we actually acts out the curvature you see that we lose all our information right so really the mask editor in this instance is actually just being driven by the curvature itself and this curvature here we can actually affect the influence of that curvature right so one that curve curvature maps gonna be fully affecting it and then zero it's not gonna affect it at all I'm gonna leave that at one and you can go ahead and play with this but this is pretty much the breakdown of the mask editor and then you know this filter here is just adding that warp effect right so let's go ahead and hide that and then we have here if we select the we go back in here and we're gonna enable that and we look at these different fills so these different fills they're just adding more information here right so this first fill here is adding dirt so what we could do and it's actually just adding it to the height right remember how we said we could actually affect different parameters in here we can go in here and change it and instead of using this dirt maybe if we want to look more like concrete we can go in here set this to concrete and just take the height of that concrete now this is gonna look more like concrete than dirt right so you could just basically add different fill layers and then set different materials and then once you add a material you could actually take which part of that material you want to actually affect or take into effect this fill it just has kind of the spots using this spots right here so what we can hide this here we see that we have a metal just a base steal this fill right here is adding some noise here right so it's just a base steal just a regular material and then they just added a fill layer here they came in here and it looks like they're applying just the color information only so this metal details here just has a blur so we'll take the blur off it looks like they added another fill layer don't be fooled or maybe mistaken right so if you see dirt three here this is just being renamed right this is actually just a fill layer so if we go in here you see properties fill so this is pretty much the root node that they used same thing here it's a fill layer and they just went in here and grab a dirt material right so they typed in dirt so let's go ahead and turn all these back on and just take a look at this if I want a little bit too quick this was just to me basically applying a smart material and going through each of the settings right the meat and potatoes of how though that effect actually got created we're actually gonna go ahead and create our own and recreate this and just add our own flair - that's right so I'll go in here now I hate the leap and then instead of a smart material we'll go here to our regular materials look for a steel so we'll put a steel rough here and I'm just looking at this orbitting and maybe I want to go with a metal so let's go with this iron a raw damage so I'm gonna select it I'm going to drag it down here and this looks pretty good I'm gonna go ahead and delete this so I just selected it you can hit the lead on your keyboard you could also select it hit the little trash bin there we have our iron damaged we're gonna go ahead and create a fill layer right for this I want kind of this industrial yellow type of color so I'll go in here I'm just gonna go ahead and play with these swatches till I get the color that I want so something a little bit more orangie there we go so that's the base color that I want and then from here I'm gonna right-click I'm gonna go ahead and add a white mask right so nothing's gonna exciting is gonna happen because you know obviously this is just a solid white mask so everything is just basically being kept how it is all right so now we have a white mask here what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click I'm gonna go to add generator right now nothing happened because we don't have a generator selected right so it's gonna tell you hey you have a generator but it's empty so we'll click generator here I'm gonna go to metal Edgware so I'm gonna build this a little bit different but we're gonna get the same result at the end of the day this is just gonna be another generator plug-in into mainly the curvature map and it's gonna basically carve out that nice edge where for our texture right so we'll select metal edge where looks like everything is flipped right so the yellow is actually supposed to be metal and the meadow supposed to be yellow so what we can do is right click here so we can select our mask here right click and then hit invert and this is gonna add a filter so if we go to invert mask you see inverted it and it just actually add a levels right here levels filter and there we go right so the cool thing about this is that now we have our yellow paint we have the generator that is mainly tied into this curvature map so if we go and take out the ambient occlusion you won't see much change you'll see a little bit of change but the bulk of the work is being driven this curvature map you see if we exit out of that most of the fat goes away this middle edge where it does have more options most of these generators have a lot of options that you could basically play with so if we wanted more where we could go ahead and scrub from left to right and that's gonna just basically apply more or less where we can play with the contrast so obviously more contrast is gonna give it more contrast try blending and blending really don't play with this much it's not really changing much so really don't use it that much the grunge amount so this does have a built in grunge slider that you could add or reduce crunch crunch scale how big you want that I do play with this quite often so sometimes I do want the Grunch or the effect to be kind of large instead of like if you go really really small this is gonna look very very repeated you know a lot of times I just kind of go for a larger grunge scale but that's how you can control the level of crunch basically being chipped away at that paint here we could control the edge smoothness I'm just gonna set that to 1 and here is the curvature weight so obviously the more closer to 1 the more weight that curvature map is actually you know inflicting so now we have this nice little chip paint effect that is mainly affecting our borders right or our edges here courtesy of that curvature map and then you know through that metal edge where it did give us some added controls to just add it kind of sprinkle some crunch the cool thing about these masks is that you know if we wanted to art direct this a little bit better right we could actually do this ourselves as well what we would have to do is we could go in here and we could add a paint layer right so maybe we can't fully get the effects that we want solely by these sliders right and this is where a lot of the textures or a lot of the materials a substance painter really can't be pushed to the next level with using brushes and paint layers especially starting out you might be tempted just to slap on kind of this smart material and leave it as B but but sometimes these materials can become very popular and it's very easy just to spot right so you don't really want to have the same material that every other artist is using so you could definitely use paint layers to really push those masks and push those unique details and look and really just have something that really makes your work pop or stand out from the crowd right so here we have this paint layer and obviously we could go in here this is affecting this here you see that we can go ahead and paint away some of these if we wanted to obviously you probably wouldn't want to be using this alpha here so let me redo that paint layer and actually get a normal alpha for this so I'm actually gonna go to brushes here and I'm gonna get this dirt right and you see that this alpha here now we have this alpha dirt brush and I'm gonna go ahead and scale this up so now I can obviously we're using white so we want to basically introduce black to our mask meaning we're gonna chip away at the paint so we can set this to black and there we go right so I'm just gonna go ahead and play with this brush and now you see that I'm actually art directing and I'm not just following or limited to whatever those sliders are just giving me right so I could go in here you know if I want to just to kind of break this up a little bit more in certain areas I can go in here or sometimes what it could happen is this is where it can become a little bit too uniform so you could actually hit X and just like in Photoshop that's gonna flip between black and white you see that right here we have black we have white by hitting X and we can go ahead and basically you know start taking away some edge wear right and and not make it as uniformly and that's one of the things about the edge wear that it can seem kind of very uniform so if you want to break that up you could definitely do that with the help of you know these brushes one of the things you might notice right off the back especially if you're working with this model is we have some very apparent seam lines so what I'm gonna do is actually have that hide the paint layer here underneath the metal you see that there's a pretty obvious scene so well we can to alleviate this seam right here is we could actually change the way that the material right is actually being projected so here we're gonna select the layer when you see that we're using the UV projection so if we go here and change this to try planar you see that is changing the projection here and we actually get rid of some of these lines right here right the same line that we had so that might actually help if you are getting a seam lines in your model sometimes with the bakes that might happen so you know switching things to try planar might actually help so we'll go ahead and turn the paint layer back on the next thing that we want to do is even though this is a uniform model we actually want to go ahead and change the color of these doors right here it's a darker metal and we do have a couple options I'll show you both the first one is going to this little thing right here and in order to actually activate it we need to be on a mask for this to be available right so what I'm gonna do is actually group both of these layers and that way since they're working as unison we need to go ahead and group them and then we can apply an additional mass to that group itself right so we'll select both layers we can go ahead and right click and we could do group layers alternatively we can hit ctrl G on our keyboard and there we go right so we'll name this yellow paint hit enter and now we'll go ahead and hide this and we're gonna go ahead and look for a darker material or a darker metal to actually build out the doors right so what I'll do here is I'll go back to my materials type in metal and we want something a little bit darker here so I think this might work so I'm gonna select this and drag it to our model alright so that looks good now we can go ahead and select this guy here just like a shop the order actually is important right so we're gonna go ahead and drag this over here and then we'll select the eyeballs and now we need to go ahead apply a mask to cut out the actual doors here to reveal the darker material so I'm gonna go ahead and right click and we'll do it at a white mask once this mass is selected you see that this option now becomes available so we'll go ahead and select polygon fill now we have these properties available to us right and we have a couple of options depending on how year a mesh is actually constructed this will work or might not work let's go over some of the options here so whatever I set this to right since we want to go ahead and take away from this mask we want to set this to black so the first one is the triangle fill now even though this might seem odd since this looks like it's all quanta what substance will actually do is triangle a your mesh so there actually are tries right here right so if we click here you see that these quads are actually triangulated so we can select the tries or we can go ahead and just select the quads here it may it might make more sense if you are just viewing the viewport here with the wireframe right so as you see as we click on these components here we're basically applying a black mask per those components we could actually move it up to a mesh fill so depending on how your mesh is built luckily for us this is a separate pieces so the mesh fill will actually work you can go ahead and do that like this the other option that I can show you is we'll go back here to our 3d and 2d view and we can go to the next one here which is your UV chunk fill right so if your object that you want to go ahead and apply that black mask to is basically its own UV island you can just select this option and you see that it'll actually work this way as well right so we can click the UV island and/or the UV chunk and it will actually start being filled the other option that we have is actually using that ID map that we generated earlier right so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna set this to white and I'll go ahead and undo this one and I'll show you how to basically apply the same method but using that ID map that we created so I'll go ahead and go back here a right-click and then I'll do a damask with color selection and as soon as I do that you see that this ID mask actually comes into play right so from the actual paint so all's I did is from the mask I right-click and I did add mask with color selection and now we could do the same exact thing right so I'll go in here and then I will do pick color in this case we want to go ahead basically pick this color so that was another way of doing the same exact thing so looking at this darker steel I want to push the material a little bit more and add some dirt and grime especially areas that are gonna make contact these crevasses here were naturally dirt and grime would accumulate over time I'm gonna go ahead and just apply some dirt so the way we're gonna do that is we'll go here we will add a fill layer so from this fill layer what I want to do is apply a mask so I'll right click I'll go to add a white mask so that's set up here I'll click on my base color and type in dirt 1 and you will see this dirt material and obviously right now it's all over the place because we haven't set up the mask properly so we'll go here click our mask right click add a generator this time under generator we will pick the dirt generator so this generator is using the curvature also is using the AO and they all makes a lot of sense because the AO is usually strongest where you have these contact shadows and that's usually where this dirt and grime will build up right in these crevices so if we go here and we take a look and we play around with the dirt levels we can start basically edit that amount of dirt and grime accumulated so play around with this play around with the contrasts a little bit and right now some of this is hard to see because we have this you know silver material this is black and white so let's go ahead and introduce some color to our dirt so I'm gonna right click the layer here at a filter and this filter is gonna be a gradient you can type it in here if you want but I'm just gonna select it here and there it is right so from this gradient I'm gonna go ahead and pick a couple colors so I'll go in here and just start pretty much setting up a brown a lighter brown color we could also increase the grunge amount as well so I finished tweaking these to my liking and I think I'm pretty happy with this if you wanted this just affect the steel right here we could just add a mask to this I actually like just kind of this overall dirt all over my model but you do have the option with masks of you know having different dirt layers and you know basically further tweaking that for each section so this looks pretty good so far you know we could call this done but I think this could actually be pushed a little bit more with some height information right and this is the cool thing about substance painter is that with alphas we can actually stamp added details and then we can bake out a normal map and have all the maps update to that new height information which will then update all the details that we build with these layers back onto the new added detail so for this you have a couple options you could use the default you can create your own alphas I'm actually going to go ahead and use a alpha this is the alpha pack that I'll be using from general tools he has a lot of these stamp collections but I'm gonna go down here this is the pact that I'll be using and this pack is pretty much for a hard surface so it does kind of fit the theme pretty well but he has a variety of other ones I will go ahead and link this in the description down below as well as the YouTube card so I'll go ahead and show you the alphas and they're already here in my alphas collection so the way he named it's pretty smart it's just Jo and Jo will actually just filter all the ones that have Jarrow on in the front which are pretty much all the hard surface stamps here so they are right here and if you need to install these what I recommend is go to your substance painter directory if you're on the window side I'll go ahead and put the director here and you can just go ahead whatever alphas you do download you could just drag them into that directory and they should be available once you start substance painter so first thing I'll do is I'll go ahead and hide all my color information all my materials and I'll get a regular layer and I'll rename this to hide underscore panels and why not just name these properly and organize this properly because we're gonna have a couple of these right so from this point I'm gonna get a fill layer underneath and just drop it in so I'll scroll down here and I'll hide color and basically I'm gonna hide everything but height and now we should be able to get a stamp or either one of these alphas to stamp with so I'm gonna go ahead and look for a cool stamp so I think I'm gonna go with this container Oh - Oh double click now we see that we can basically stamp with this alpha right so I want to make sure that I'm going down on this I want this to be actually pushing down on our mesh and you see that we're starting to get a nice little result here right so what I need to do is first do a couple of things if I want to work symmetrically we can enable symmetry and symmetry is right here so we can enable this we can change our symmetry settings but I think I want to go ahead and work with the X so now we have symmetry working so from this point I'm gonna go ahead and just with control and right clicking and doing a scrubbing left to right I'm increasing the size of this and maybe we can put just stamp a little bit of detail right there and I'm actually just gonna change this so let's go ahead and try a different panel line so let's check out this container for ya I like this a lot better and so I'm gonna select this here what I'll do in this case is I want to right in the middle I can go to my display settings here I'm gonna show the wireframe and bring this color down so now with the wireframe it's gonna be easier for me to get right in the middle of this and just line it up pretty straight and sometimes they might take a couple of times just to kind of line it up so you definitely have to be patient but you can see that having the mesh underneath that the wireframes definitely helps so I like that a lot so let's go ahead and I'm not gonna get too carried away with these stamps I just want to show you how they work and it is actually easy to get carried away with these so from here let's go ahead and look for another one so I'm gonna select this container here or this handle I'm gonna dial this down just a little bit I don't want it that strong I'm gonna go ahead and plop this guy right about here I like how that looks so a lot of this is gonna be just pretty much me exploring so what I'll do in this case is I'll go ahead and fast-forward this but I'm basically just selecting these guys and clicking them on there and pretty much pushing down all my surface you alright next we're gonna go ahead and use radio symmetry to draw some bolts around these apart right here so what I'll do is actually create a new layer I'll rename this to height underscore bolts and the reason I'm doing this is obviously we could have everything in one layer but let's just say that if we wanted to erase some of this some of these details here on this panels layer what we could do is either we could apply a mask or we could go with the eraser and just erase some of that height information right and right now we have radio symmetry and that's why you know this is a little bit wonky but you get the point right so at any point you can either erase delete these layers but just for organizational purposes I do recommend that you break these down logically all right so here we'll go ahead and get radial symmetry working so we'll go here to the radial symmetry options and we want to figure out how many counts and then what axes we need to work with well looks like or an X and X is the actual symmetry though or the actual axes that we need so we're gonna leave that alone so we'll go back here to the settings and maybe we want let's see how 12 looks here maybe increase it just a little bit more so let's up this to about 12 or I'm sorry 16 I'm gonna get a nice bolt pattern here so I'm gonna double click here let's go to brush and see what we get so there's something going on here let's go ahead and troubleshoot this so it wraps all the way around and it's giving us here a preview so we need to play with the angle span and we didn't have this to 360 so it won't actually revolve 360 right so I'm gonna go ahead and put this one right here maybe I'll make this a little bit smaller yeah and I like how that looks looks pretty clean we'll go ahead and do the same thing on the other side and you can see that having that wireframe there really just helps us get pretty precise in the placement let's see how this would look with another row right here yeah it doesn't look bad at all so I'm gonna go ahead and repeat that on this other side and a lot of this stuff is just trial and error so I'm just experimenting with different patterns the last thing that I want to do is I want to create just the panel line I'm not sure how that got there probably when I was doing radial symmetry but not a big deal it's in this layer right here so I'll go ahead and with my eraser tool just erase it I'll go ahead and kill our radial symmetry and actually just disable it altogether make sure I'm on the right layer and I'm gonna erase that information there and then I'll create one more layer I'll name this height panel lines for this I just need a regular alpha so I think this looks pretty good when you try to create a panel line obviously you can freeform it but you probably don't want that substance does have a couple of options that make this a little bit easier so I'm hold down ctrl scrub left to right holding the right mouse button just to basically get my height just pretty much almost to match this thickness here and then I'm gonna click here and then we can hold down shift and then ctrl is gonna actually snap looks like 15 degree increments so sometimes this is easier to do on the UV layout itself versus the 3d mode so what I'll do is I'm just gonna undo that and I'm gonna try that here on the map itself or just the texture map itself so I'm gonna click hold down shift and you see that it's a lot easier doing it here especially if we have this wireframe so I'm gonna match that up and there we go so we get a nice clean panel line and obviously we're gonna have to erase a little bit here or we could just be a little bit more careful with the with the stroke that we're doing all right so this that looks pretty good just trying to match it up so the corners are not that bad you can't always just go in and if you wanted to clean it up let's see if we can erase here a little bit you could clean that up if you need it but I think that looks pretty good especially when we remake these maps this is gonna have a oh so a lot of this is gonna just fill in and blend in a lot better than it is now so I'll go back to your brush one thing I do recommend on your brush setting is remember the size of your brush so this is one point two seven and that's because a lot of times I'll change the brush size on the fly with the shortcut and I'll forget what this is so you can't create a custom brush I'm not gonna get into all that but just it's a good thing to remember your brush size it's also right here on the size as well all right so that panel line looks pretty good trying to see where else we could drop another panel line I think I'm just going to extend it here what we can do is enable a symmetry again so that looks good so that should basically take care of the other side for us so I'll go in here same thing click hold on shift so it looks pretty good and there the other side is updated as well I need to erase that I'm not gonna worry about it right now cuz I'm just gonna go ahead and draw the panel line cut right through it and then we can go ahead and take care of this erasing this in a second so I'll find this guy here same thing as before I'll click here and this should be about the middle and there we go there's our other panel line it's this layer here so we'll click the eraser tool I'm just gonna drag this up clean that up and it just what radial symmetry looks like I drew a bunch of these which they shouldn't be so I'm gonna clean these up really quick and that's kind of a good thing about having things in separate layers just helps you helps you troubleshoot if you ever have issues like this all right so I went through and just kind of clean that up a little bit and I think I'm gonna do some additional bolt around this panel line here I think this is gonna just tie in both of these pieces so I'll go back to my bolt here I'll find that same bolt pattern it looks like it was this one here make sure that's on the actual brush and not the eraser find this layer here bring up my brush you all right so I think that looks pretty good maybe we can drop something else maybe here just another little piece and a lot of times this is a lot of just trial and error going through and you know finding the one piece that's gonna complement this so it doesn't come naturally or quick just doing these designs even though the process is somewhat fun and easy just finding good design and finding that balance can take a little bit of time you all right so this actually looks pretty good I'm happy with all the details so let's go ahead and hide our fill later and enable our other layers on here so we'll see that this starts to blend a little bit better but if we actually zoom in we only have height information and all the work that we did on these right here right the edge where the grime it's not being applied to this right because we actually have to do a additional step in order to get this to recalculate all these maps so what we're gonna do is bake out a normal map and then from that normal map we're gonna rebake all these other maps all right so the first thing that we need do is we'll go to file we'll go to export textures this can seem a little bit intimidating here but basically we have predetermined configurations for substance painter right so if you're going to a package like Maya so we have a or no preset if you're using a key shot there it is so depending on where your final rendering journey ends you definitely have a lot of different presets for use within substance painter if you need to get more advanced you can build your own within this configuration tab I'm not gonna dive into it right now there's a little bit more advanced and you can really just do a lot with the uh presets that you have alright so from here what I'm gonna do is I want to export the normal map so I already have a preset this will just export your normal map you won't have that preset so the what you can do is you can do document channels normal a alright so that has a normal already built in so we'll select that it's gonna spit out this is gonna be your directory let's go ahead and bring this up so for my final I want everything to be nice and high-res so I'm gonna do for K a for K map that's gonna be the final bakes I won't do a tiff we could set this to 16-bits this should be ready to go I'll hit export I'll go to open fold so this is the map that has spit out this meadow zero one normal Direct X from here we just basically have to re import it into our scene so from within your export folder all you do is just take that file and just drag it into the shelf and then we have to define a couple parameters so instead of undefined I'll go to texture import resources to will do this as a project a current session is once you exit out of this it will be lost project is any time that you open up this file it'll be there if it's associated with this project and then the shelf is going to always be there when you open up substance we want to do project and hit import there it is under textures there's our map so now we can go to our texture set settings there's no normal map here which is perfect we're gonna click drag and drop that there one thing we should do is a get rid of or at least hide all this height information so I'll go ahead and select all of them you can select multiple layers by holding clicking one hold down shift click on the bottom we have a group selection I'll hit control G that's gonna group it I'll double click to rename so we'll do height underscore stamps and we'll hide that because now we have a normal map that's driving this information alright so from here we'll go to texture set settings we will go to bake mesh maps now the key to getting this to work is that we don't really need to select normal map right we want to derive all these maps or bake them derived from this new normal map so we'll leave normal unchecked I'm gonna go ahead and put this up to 4k what I'll do from here is I'll go to bake metal 0 1 mesh maps and I'll speed up video I'll hit okay and one thing I should do is hide the wireframe so we'll get rid of the wireframe by going here to our display settings we will uncheck this right here so I'm looking at this all the maps updated the material updated to fit the new height information but I want to go ahead and break this up just a little bit more so I'm gonna show you how you can do this and actually copy and paste masks as well right so I'm gonna drag a steel painted here just to show you the example so we have this steel painted material let's go ahead and hide the dirt we'll also hide the yellow paint you see that we have this steel painted underneath right so we want to go ahead isolate this ring right here so the first thing that we need to do is have this on top but cut through and actually showed this different color bay doors right so we're gonna go ahead and right-click we're gonna add a white mask we can go ahead and take off symmetry here and then from here we want to add a using the polygon fill option we'll go to mesh fill here set this to black and now you see that we're cutting in here we're cutting in here cutting in here and cutting in here alright the next thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna go here to our paint and do a similar process so from this point we want to tweak this mask right so we already have this set to a polygon or a mesh fill that's not gonna work cuz this is the same mesh right so what we need to do in this case is do a UV filter right because if we look at our you these these guys are separate UV groups right so when we're clicking you see that these guys are actually being isolated so the mesh won't work but the UV chunk will actually do it right so we'll click here and start selecting these UV chunks and that's why it's important if you know that you're gonna be going to substance painter sometimes you can lay out your UVs in a way that's actually gonna help you quite a bit wouldn't bringing them in and doing masking and selections right so that looks pretty good but the problem is we probably don't want this bright red right so we no longer need ru V's I'm gonna go ahead and hide this go back to 3d only so we have the right mask the wrong material luckily we could copy a mask paste it onto the right material right so let's go ahead and bring the one that we want the material that we want I'm gonna go with this steel rough damage I'll go ahead and bring this in like this and this looks pretty good so what we'll do in this case is we want to go ahead and use this mask here and apply it here we'll go ahead and add a white mask we'll go here have the mask selected right click we'll go to copy mask we'll hide this guy here we'll select this mask right click and then I'll go paste into mask and now you see that this mask I pasted and all the work looks good we didn't have to start over we're babes basically able to copy and paste that mask we can take this guy here delete it we can go back to our brush and I think that looks pretty good let's enable our dirt and before I run into this I do want to show you the filters so you could actually filter through each channel so if you said C on your keyboard you'll get each separate channel by itself you can paint this way or you could troubleshoot you could actually filter this way with this drop-down menu to get back to your material you just hit em and there you go so now I'll go ahead and go into IRA and hit this little camera icon what we'll want to do is hide the background at least I like to do it I think this is a little bit too busy so I'll go here to the settings and we'll select clear color we'll go ahead and just give it a little bit of a tint so I think that looks pretty good if we don't want that contact shadow we could get rid of the ground and that's right here we'll just uncheck ground we got rid of that and now we just want to rotate the sphere and figure out just the right angle but I think I'm gonna change this and you can play around with this however you want I'm gonna go to this bus garage and you'll definitely want to pick an environment sphere that complements your model and I'll go ahead and rotate and just find somewhere where the highlights and the shadows look right and I'm holding on shift and right clicking just like it when I do when I'm in normal mode when I'm painting my textures to orbit this environment or to rotate it so I finally got the angle that I wanted so I'm gonna let substance actually render this a little bit longer so I'll go to render settings here and I'm gonna play with the samples all right so what I want to do is instead of 10 seconds I'm gonna let this render out for 60 so you see that I put up the time and this is doing more iterations and the more iterations the clear this will be so I'll let it render I'll pause this and then I'll see you when this is done you can also play with the samples here and crank these up but this looks pretty good I'm happy with it this is the final render so the last order of business is to actually export this out if you need to override your doc your viewport resolution then you can do it here and I'm actually just gonna do 1920 by 1080 so it looks nice on a video so there we go you have the option of sharing this to art station as well I'll hit save render to save locally and that is the end of my substance painter for beginners complete tutorial so thank you so much for watching this substance painter beginners tutorial and hopefully substance painter and the information that you watch today will improve the overall quality of your 3d assets and your overall portfolio as always please let me know what you thought of the video in the comments down below like the video and please consider subscribing to the channel as I plan on doing a lot more substance painter tutorials like this more often thank you so much folks and I will catch you next time [Music]

Channel: JL Mussi

Views: 472,931

Rating: 4.9414334 out of 5

Keywords: IntroToSubstance, tutorial, film, vfx, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, mari, Substance Painter Intro, substance painter tutorial, substance painter baking, substance painter 2019, substance painter timelapse, substance painter to maya, substance painter stylized, how to use substance painter, substance painter metal, substance painter metal texture, substance painter for beginners

Id: s2MOx1Iteik

Length: 78min 10sec (4690 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AndrewTheGoat22]

Thanks, this looks helpful! Can’t wait to check it out later :)

[u/suh_dude_crossfire]

Hey, your vids are so good. I was wondering if you could do a video focusing on UV mapping, texel density exporting UVs from a model and how to export as 4096 x 4096 resolution into Substance Painter and general need to know basics about UVs. I have the question that, on a low poly import, does more vertices = higher resolution textures? for example. Great vids as always!

[u/MacaroniHouses]

very excited for this! have not been able to get a handle of substance painter and it feels like i'm the only one, so right off the bat i love this. also love that you provide a model, so weird to follow along and not have the same model.

[u/FlirtySingleSupport]

is this good for modeling characters? or is something like z-brush better? Maya to Unreal ideally.