Substance Painter Layers and Masks

yeah yeah load one Steve white here for pixel fun do this video I'd like to talk about working with layers in substance painter so here I'm in substance painter and I have my object loaded in I've already went ahead and baked out my maps here I'm working at a 2k resolution and I'm using the PBR metallic roughness workflow which by default will give us a base color height roughness metallic and normal Channel I only have one material applied to my object and you can see that up here in my texture set list and that's just called crate and then over here in the layers panel we can talk about the few different kinds of layers that we can add to our object so first we have what's known as a standard layer this is just going to be a painting layer anytime you're going to be painting on your object you know using the particle brushes things like that you're going to be using a standard layer next we have a fill layer which is just going to allow you to throw a material into your object and just have those applied you know as opposed to painting them in yourself so let's go ahead and add a fill layer and if we look down here our material properties you can see all those channels that make up the PBR shader here and these are all currently enabled by default you can see the little blue lines beside each of these you go ahead and disable any of these channels that you don't want to use in this layer and that's all I'm going to remove their properties here below so I'll go ahead and rename those so now we can go ahead and adjust our parameter so for our base color if I go ahead and set a color on there it's going to fill our object and with that color roughness you know if we slip this all over white it's going to be very rough and dull if we set it all the way down to black now it's going to be very smooth and shiny same with metallic currently right now it looks like a shiny plastic material if we turn this all the way up to white now we're actually getting a metallic looking surface okay so that is a regular fill layer so now I'll go ahead and add a regular layer and so now if we hover over our object you can see that we're getting a paintbrush icon so now we can actually start painting our object so if I go ahead and you know draw stroke on our object here you can see that we're getting a little bit of height information we're getting that metallic and smoothness and color coming through so you're when you're working with a painting layer if all of your channels are enabled you're painting with all of those channels all at once and again we can disable any of these channels that we don't want so now if we just wanted to paint without the color we could do that and when we can adjust our settings and then have those reflected so right now our height is set to white which is a positive value so it's pushing up from the surface if we turn this down the the opposite side now we're actually cutting into our surface all right so that is a standard layer so I'll go ahead and cut that okay so now that we've seen the two different kinds of layers that we can add to our object one thing I we should talk a little more about you know the way we control our layers up here in the layers panel so let me go ahead and add a layer again why to fill later I'll put in my paint here I will make this you know shiny and metallic okay so up here in the layers panel the one thing you should know is these act similar to the way Photoshop layers work in the sense that we have blending modes so if you want to you know if you have layers below this and you wanted to plan this with another door below you know you have all the usual options and some different ones here we can use for that you can also control the opacity now when you when you dial in this opacity if I just dial down you can notice that you know the metal on the smoothness is still there but the color is fading well these are control up here in this little drop down and the way you can control all these channels individually so let's go to metallic and now if I start dialing this down now you can see the that metallic fades so just a way to you know give you a little more control over how how materials are applied to your object so let me go ahead and remove that we need to talk about now how we blend between different layers other than using a blending mode and that way is masking so let me go ahead and add a shiny iron material to my object and you can see that's filled in our object with this shiny material and basically when you drag in a material you're adding a fill layer and you can see you cannot paint on this object it'll tell your fill layers are not paintable so let's go ahead and add a rust on top of that okay so you can see that substance is a top-down sort of stack to where anything you put on the top is going to hide anything that you put love it on the layer stack so to blend start blending between these materials there's some different options we can have so let me go ahead and right-click on this and I'm going to add a black mass to my object and that's going to completely cover up that rust that we just added so now we need to go in and adjust our mask right now it's just a black image that's sitting on top of our rust value we need to add in some white to tell substance where to sort of reveal that rust below so I'll go in and right click on the mask and I'm come down here and add what's called a generator and if we come over to our properties and go to the generators tab here I'm going to click on this and you can see that we have some different effects here that we can apply to our mask so we have like a dirt and dripping rust about a Ledge where you know we can configure our own mask so I'm just going to use a dripping across for now and you can see if we come up here and hover over our mask you can see what that's done to our mask it's added in these white values based on this on this you know dripping rust generator and you can see the effect that's having on our object so now we can come in and adjust the the generator properties so if we want more or less rust we can dial it in we want the drips to be you know a lot more intense we can do that okay so that is just how masking works in painter let's say now I want to I want to add another layer on top and make this a painted object with that sort of rusty metal kind of being exposed below so I wouldn't do is I'm going to come up here and I'm going to add a filler to the top of my stack and I'm going to split a color okay and then I will come in and I can adjust the roughness actually we can do for the roughness if we click on this it's going to go ahead and pull up our little mini library over here and I've already done a search for grunge you can just type in anything you want here and it will sort of filter out the results you're looking for and we're going on here and just choose a grunge map and now that grunge is being applied to our roughness so you can see we're getting a nice variation of roughness and you know smoothness across your object so now that we have that I'm going to expose that rusty metal below so we're going to do is I'm going to come in here and add a black mask and then I'll right-click on my mask and I'm going to pull up another generator so this time I'm going to come to my generator and I'm going to use a metal edge where and now you can see that paint is being added along the edges and I actually want the opposite I want the paint just to be worn off in the edges so we come over to our generator I'm going to use the invert button and invert that and so now you can see we're getting a nice metal edge where around our object but it's a little too consistently think you know they're all just very evenly worn off and we can go in and customize that so what I'm gonna do is right-click on the mask again and I'm going to add another effect and I'm going to add a paint layer so now we can actually come in and actually paint on our mask so right now if we came out here we're painting with white so basically that's going to let me do that that's actually a particle brush we'll get to that in a second let me go to my brushes I'm going to choose like a dirt and we lower my brush size here and now when we start painting we're actually painting white on the object and covering that up but I want to turn this down the block and start exposing that metal below so you can just sort of come in here and just sort of fine-tune your mask and you know get exactly the effect you're after okay so just another way to add a mask you could also if you wanted to let's say we just removed that you could come in here and just add a fill layer and now we can come in here and just adds that same grunge you know maybe to that at night see that that's just sort of using that grunge map to determine where you know that is shown through now it looks a little soft like it's sort of semi-transparent you come over here in just the contrast and bring that up and so now you're getting more of a harsh look but I'm gonna go ahead and remove that I liked what I had before we'll just add that generator metal edge where invert that you know and so we're back to where we work so now what I want to do is like say this objects been sitting out in the Sun and rain and so it's exposed to the elements and it's got from the rain it's been rusted and rust is you know the water just drips down the sides we can add a nice dripping rust effects so I'm going to go ahead and come back to my materials and we'll add a rust on top of that I'm sailing to actually pull it to the top of the stack there and again I'm going to mask that out and we're going to come in and this time I'm just going to add a paint layer so I'm gonna come back to our particle brushes and we're going to use this heavy leakes brush all these particle brushes just have different physics properties over here that you can adjust and you know and get different effects so let's go ahead and see what this does first so I'm going to come in here and I'm gonna make my brush size a little bigger and said I want to this trip and rust to be leaking out from all underneath all these ridges so what I can do is just come in here and just start painting across here and those particles are just going to run down our surface and give us just a really nice leaking effect and you can control the number of particles you know how much this spreads you know how fast these particles move you know it's just one of the one of the real cool really cool things about working with substance painter so you get some nice effects like that okay so the one last thing I want to talk about in masking is using the polygon fill tool so what you can do is it like say you wanted to have a completely different material on this object like like say these ridges you wanted a different kind of metal or you know something else so let me what I want to do is I'm going to go ahead and add a folder and we're going to name this folder will just call this ridges maybe and I'm going to take all those layers I'm just going to right click click on the top one shift-click the bottom one just to select all those layers I'm just going to drag those into our ridges folder so now you see if we collapse that we have a folder structure in our layer stack let me go ahead and add a black mask to that whole structure okay so now that it's completely covering up you know all the layers that we had below so up here in our tool bar we have a tool called polygon fill and basically we're going to be adding to our men are you know the white to our mask using some different methods here so we come over here a polygon fill we have some different message we have triangle fill polygon fill Nashville and UV chunk fill so now triangle fill and polygon feel we're going to do the same thing here because this has all been triangulated but if we do something like UV chunk and these are the top and bottom of our item in our UV map so if we click on this and click on this it's basically going to take that island and mask them out so now we're just exposing the top and the bottom of that object same thing here we come to polygon fill maybe and just start clicking on these polygons and we're basically going to be adding that you know to our mask and mask those surfaces out you can also click and drag in the viewport and that will just sort of select all the faces you want to click that will just make things a little easier do that so now we can do is we can actually come in and you know add another material to our object and I'm actually going to drag this below ours you know so now you can see we have two different materials applied to our object and again we can come up here say we didn't want this to be blue and come up to our mask again still using that polygon fill tool and just come in here and map those out okay well that wraps us up I hope that was helpful I just wanted to give an overview of how to start working with layers and blending and substance painter yeah yeah

Channel: Pixel Fondue

Views: 167,036

Keywords: steve white, Substance Painter, Pixel Fondue, Layers

Id: 4AKqBE3BUI0

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2017