Substance Painter to Arnold workflow | How to export and connect textures

what's up guys welcome back to the channel into another weekly 3d model except for this week we're actually not going to be doing a model i thought i'd change it up and do something a little bit different so lately i've been getting a lot of requests to do more tutorial based videos specifically on how to export my textures from substance banner and hook them back up in maya so i thought this week would be a great opportunity to show you exactly how i do that and i'm going to show you with this little turtle so without further ado let's just get started alright so starting off in substance painter i have this little turtle model that we're going to use as our base mesh and we're going to texture this little thing really fast and then export those textures to hook up in maya so first thing we got to do since i just opened this is bake out some texture so i can apply those materials so i'm going to quickly go over to my texture set settings scroll down to big mesh maps and i can choose an output size so for the sake of this tutorial i'm just going to do 2k and then make sure to check on your used low poly meshes high poly mesh since we only have one mesh that we're working with and then i can bake out those textures [Music] so we're going to go over to the materials tab here and then go find a material that we can apply to this turtle so i have this material i found on substance source you can jump on there and download it if you'd like to add it to your library and it looks pretty cool it's like a wood carving turtle that was left outside for a while and let's say this is a material that you were really happy with and you wanted to export so we're going to go ahead and export this so what we're going to do is go up to file and go to export textures this is going to bring up a window that gives you a few settings depending on how you want to export these textures so the first one is your output directory that is just where you do you want to actually export those textures to so what we're going to do is just select my desktop and i'm going to create a folder for these textures so turtle texture seems pretty fitting then we're going to select that folder so now all those textures once you press export will actually go to that folder next up is your output template so this is depending on where your model is going to be used in this case because we're going back to maya and i'm running with arnold it makes sense to choose arnold ai standard if i was going to use this in unreal i could go down to unreal or unity or depending on whatever it's really nice because they give you all these presets which makes your life a little bit easier and they give you different maps so if you're curious what maps those actually give you you can switch over this output template tab and this depending on which one you click will show you all the maps that they preset for you so with arnold they have these and so forth so if you're curious and you want to add specific maps or you want to remove some you can go ahead and do that here otherwise we're going to jump back to the settings so for the rest of these we're going to keep them default if you did have a file type preference you could choose that or a file size now we already set this we went to google pick our textures but if you had a different preference afterwards you could change that here but we're just going to leave all this as is and go down to export so once substance does all the magic you are ready to go you have those textures exported to that folder we created and we're ready to jump into maya so we can apply those so let's jump over to maya alright so now quickly jumping over to maya we have our untextured turtle that we need to apply those textures to so the first step would be making sure that you have an ai standard material applied as we set that as our output template in substance we need to make sure that that's applied to our turtle so i'm going to right click him go down to assign new material and i can go over to arnold and apply an ai standard surface that way we have all the correct settings so we can apply those textures correctly so we go ahead and look at our folder that we exported those textures to you can see how it gave us these five different maps so we have a base color metalness normal roughness and a height now usually i would not use this height map and i would normally just exit that in our template now i kept everything default so it did give us our height map and that is can be useful in different situations so this could be handy depending on what let's say you're doing like a terrain and you want to just add your height map as like a displacement map that could be beneficial and useful for you but when it comes to a model like this i'm not going to use that now i don't want to get into node-based textures for this tutorial i want to keep it very simple but i will show you at the very end really quickly how i would assign this height map and why i wouldn't as well so let's start off with the base color so choosing our turtle i'm going to go over to our ai standard surface now i can give this a name so turtle texture is fitting and we can go over to the color tab here so i'm going to click this little button here the checkered and we can choose a file since we have a file to assign to it clicking this folder i can go ahead and find that folder that we created earlier and i can click on my base color now when you sign that you're not going to see anything and that's simple that's just because this textured toggle option up here is not turned on so we're going to go ahead and turn this on and you'll be able to see some textures now we still have a little bit more work to do so let's go ahead and do that so this button up here is your back button it basically goes to the previous menu and this is super handy when you're sending your textures so i would get in the habit of clicking this when you press this guy it's going to go back and we can move down the list to our next material so we have metalness so let's click on this and we can go assign a file we can go find our metalness texture to apply so we can click on this guy and press open so there's a few settings you have to do now color space is set to srgb now for every texture that you have for material basically all of these different maps you want to set this to raw except for your base color so in other versions of maya it's just a drop down i know in 2022 they have this new side option so under utility you'll find raw but you want to make sure that this is set to raw and that's to all of your maps except for your base color one more setting under the color balance you want to make sure you have this alpha is luminance checked so these are the only two settings you really need to worry about and we can hit the back button here and move on to our next one which is roughness so let's click this roughness and we can go assign that to this file so selecting the roughness i can open that and just like we did to the metalness we're going to go switch this over to raw and i can go down and make sure alpha's luminance is checked [Music] and last but not least is our normal map so that's under geometry so if you drop this menu down and under bump mapping you're going to select this guy and choose another file once again now you're not going to add it to your bump depth you're just going to add it to your bump value so we're going to click this select the folder and we can go ahead and select normal [Music] now there's a few settings that are important for normal maps so once again you want to switch this over to raw and alpha is luminance already comes pre-checked for you so you're fine for that one but if you hit the back button you're going to come to a different menu and this is important to make sure that you switch your this option right here from bump to tangent space normals now i'm pretty confident in future updates this is probably going to come standard but for the time being you need to make sure to switch this over now you already see that the model looks a little bit better so let's go take a look and see how its texture looks now if i go up to arnold and go open arnold render view and we press play obviously it's going to be dark and you're not going to see anything and that's just because we don't have light in our scene now i don't want to get into a whole lighting tutorial i want to keep this really short and simple so let's just quickly go up to arnold and add a skydome light and then if we go back to our previewer we can see what it looks like [Music] cool so those textures look good now it's quite small so let's just go back to these render settings here beside our hypershade and let's just quickly scroll down and change the preset up to 1080. that way when i go back to our rendered preview it's just gonna be a little bit larger and a little bit easier for us to see so things are looking good it just looks a little bit different and that's just because of the white background and probably the ground plane having a little more shadow so let's just quickly go at a ground plane scale this up let's go select these edges i'm just going to extrude them up now this is necessary this is just for the render since we're comparing it to substance so let's try to get it close i'm going to double click this give it a little bit of a bevel [Music] and just move it down a little bit so we jump back into our renderer you can see it's looking a little better this little shadow now underneath it now a good habit to get into if you are rendering is obviously create a camera so you're not rendering from perspective so i'm going to quickly just for the sake of this go into my camera now if you hit this to show your resolution gates you can actually fit your model correctly into your render and you can actually see the size that your render is going to be so i'm going to position this right in front like our substance image [Music] and i can go back to this guy and make sure it's right now it's previewing from our perspective so we're going to preview from our new camera play and we're looking pretty good now the biggest difference you're going to find is lighting the lighting presets that come in substance are pretty awesome and ideal for this environment maps that they're set in so to get it exactly substance is going to take a little bit of work when it comes to your lighting now i'm not going to spend too much time like i said i don't want this to be a lighting tutorial or anything i don't know why we have these weird faces on the sides my ocd that would just bother me so i'm going to delete them but i'm going to go ahead under arnold lights and i'm going to create just an area light just so we can look at the texture a little bit better i'm gonna scale this up position it check normalize and get the exposure up just because i want to see the light [Music] and let's see what we're at so it's looking pretty good obviously substance has it's like a little bit brighter and this background plane's a little bit darker but either way without getting too technical into things like lighting you can see how easy it is to bring your textures right out of substance painter and bring them into maya alright so really quickly before i wrap up this tutorial i want to show you that displacement map and how would i actually apply that and why i wouldn't apply it so if i go back to my folder here you can see it gave me this height map so what i'm going to do is actually go into my texture nodes and that's up here in the hypershade now this is also really handy if you want to see how texture nodes work and you're new to it so you want to see how they connect things and how things look you can go up here to your turtle texture we created right click and press graph network and now it shows you all the texture nodes and how they're all connected so when we applied them over here in our attribute editor they automatically connected all of these so if you're curious how this stuff works this is a good way to take a quick look and i'm not going to go over this in this tutorial so i'm just going to quickly show you how i would apply that height map so first off by pressing tab you can press in file so we need a file since we have a file we want to load [Music] then we can go find that height map and we can open that and assign it to that file so now all we need to do is press tab and press displacement now we don't need this blue one over here because we already have our turtle one up here so we can go ahead and delete that [Music] just have to connect these and now because our scale is super high you're going to see this is going to be a thick turtle as soon as i render this out you'll see it puffs up and that displacement map is being projected onto the model so that's not good in this case so maybe you could throw this down to like two and then you see he still has a little thick fingers but so in this case i wouldn't it wouldn't be benefiting me to use it now i'm sure there's way better texture artists out there that can correct me and i'm sure they could use this displacement map in some way to benefit this model but when it comes down to my workflow i personally wouldn't so i'm going to go ahead and delete all of these if i re-render this it's going to go back then and that's basically everything you could quickly go back to some of these settings if you were going to render this out now i would change the image format to png or whatever you'd like i choose png and you could go over to the arnold renderer and just increase some of these so i would increase this to two and maybe just bump these up like maybe double some of these you don't have to go too crazy but that's probably what i would do and then just open up your render window and you can just render out that camera and that's basically it guys that's the whole video and that's the whole process i would do with exporting my textures from substance painter and then linking them up in maya to render it with arnold if you like the video give it a like and subscribe and let me know in the comments if you want to see more tutorial based videos in the future other than that i will see you guys in the next one [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Polyrendr

Views: 29,902

Keywords: tutorial, substance, maya, textures, exporting textures, connecting textures, linking textures

Id: YZXbLjjV2HE

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2022