Substance Painter Trick everyone NEEDS to KNOW (how to use anchor points)

hey everybody so I'm sitting here retexturing this classic drone model from rendercrate try to give it some cool texture variations and I realized we needed to talk about something really cool that substance painter can do that we've never really covered on the channel before but really quick before we get to that I've already started texturing this thing and if you want to know how to retext or render create assets yourself you can watch this video that we made a while back where I showed you step by step how to retexture our motorcycle asset so today I want to show you guys how to use anchor points a lot of people seem confused on what they are what they're used for and if you use substance painter you should learn how to use anchor points so anchor points are a way for layers materials and masks to reference other layers materials and masks so that seems really boring and simple but once I show you how it works you'll see that the possibilities are just endless for really cool effects so first let me just show you what they are and kind of the most basic use for them so I've got this retextured drone here and I'm actually going to turn off a few of the details so that what is going on here is a little bit less confusing and busy so I've got a metal material which looks like this and on top of that I've got a yellow paint material which looks like this but you'll see that the paint is being removed on the sharp edges of the model and that's being done automatically or procedurally now the way that substance painter knows where to remove the paint is by using our baked mesh Maps which again will be covered in that motorcycle video but if I press B to cycle through my maps we can look at curvature and this is actually the map that shows substance painter where all of the edges of my model are and that's how it knows where to remove the paint on the sharp edges but let's say I wanted to add some detail because it's looking a little bit flat right here to do that I'm going to create a paint layer just a blank paint layer and I'll call it details now I put it at the bottom and that's very important because anchor points can only reference layers that are lower than them in the layer stack so if you want all of the layers to be able to reference this detail that we're about to make it helps to put it way at the bottom so I'm going to grab a nice normal detail to put on my brush and I'm going to use this like a stamp and I'll stamp it right here so now we have this really cool normal lap detail on the model and the light is reacting as if it's real geometry and real height information but the paint layer doesn't recognize that it's there and it's not removing paint along the edges because again if I go to my baked mesh Maps we didn't change the curvature and the curvature is what's driving this peeling paint so we need the paint layer the mask for the paint layer to recognize this detail and to sort of trick it into thinking that it's real modeled geometry so I'm going to right click on my details layer and at the bottom I'm going to click add anchor points we can call this Anchor Point whatever we want but I'll just leave it as details because that makes sense okay now I'm going to go to my paint mask which is right here this is my paint folder this is the mask that is driving the paint and right now I have a generator called curvature which is what's causing these chipped edges to appear so I'm going to click on that generator where the edges are being made and I'm going to scroll down until I see use micro details so like a little button that's really easy to miss I'm going to click on true and then I'll scroll down and I see two new slots for textures so once again again this curvature map is what's driving the edges but now I have a micro normal and a micro height slot so I can click on this and go to my anchor points Tab and choose the details and it says which channel should we look at well not the color we want to look at normal and we can see just like that the paint layer is recognizing that normal information now just a quick tip if you didn't use a normal brush a normal matte brush to create that detail and you use height instead then you want to do the same thing but with the height channel so what's really cool is now my Dynamic generator can be adjusted and it's as if that detail is molded right into the surface and the paint is recognizing it so that's kind of of the most basic and most common use that I have found for anchor points but this tool is really powerful and there's tons of possibilities so let me show you a few other things we can do so I've started with a fresh new scene here just so that we're not so overwhelmed by all the layers we had on that drone so I've only got two layers now I've got the basic steel underneath and then a paint layer on top so what most people do if they want chipped paint is they go here and they find a smart mask or something and they just drop it onto the paint then you adjust your smart mask maybe I'll turn down the wear level just so we get some little chips so now you see we've got some bare metal along the edges which looks pretty cool and then most people say to themselves okay paint's got a little bit of thickness so I'll just go to my paint layer and I'll scroll down and maybe increase the height so now there's a little bit of a lip to the paint which does look cool it does add detail but what if I want the paint to get thicker as it gets towards the edge of the paint layer so it's not just a uniform thickness and what that can do for us is actually simulate paint chipping and sort of peeling away from the surface so what I'm going to do is click on my mask for my paint and I'm going to go here to add effect and I'm going to choose add Anchor Point and we'll call this paint mask and we can actually go back to our paint layer and turn the height back to normal because we're going to create another layer just for height so over here in your layer palette you want to add a fill layer and I'll call this paint height now in the material settings I'm going to turn off everything except the height Channel and then I'll turn the height up just a little bit like maybe 0.1 or less now we didn't see anything change yet but that's because we need to tell this new height layer to reference this Anchor Point from the paint mask from before so on the paint height layer I'm going to right click and add a black mask and then I'll add a fill to it and inside that fill instead of filling it with a color or a pattern I'm going to actually click on it and tell it to reference my paint mask Anchor Point so now we're back to where we started before where it just looks like the paint is a default thickness and that's because if I alt click on my mask I can see it's just copying my paint mask so if I all click on my paint mask it looks the same as my paint height but we can actually add effects to this paint height mask to make it sort of curl up at the edges so I'm going to click on the paint height mask then you click on ADD effects and go to add filter and then here in the filter I'm going to click on high pass filter so notice what this does it takes the border between the black pixels and the white pixels and it creates kind of a little gradient between them and if I look at my material you can see it's actually already starting to work but we can refine this a little bit more I'm going to alt click on my mask again so I can see it and then I'm going to add an effect levels and let's Crush those mid tones all the way down to Black so now you can see we have a gradient a sharp gradient ramping up towards the edge of the paint and then quickly dropping off where the paint ends so let's go ahead and press M for material and we can see that it's starting to work now the cool thing about this is we can refine it so I can adjust the mid tones or the gamma to sort of sharpen it up if I want to and I can also click on the high pass filter here and I can adjust the radius to sharpen it up or spread it out but because it's Dynamic I can also go all the way back to my paint mask and I can add add a new paint layer notice that I've kept the paint layer underneath the Anchor Point that's because the Anchor Point will only reference what's below it so keep that in mind but I can add a new paint layer and find it ice Alpha and start removing some paint manually and notice what happens here it's kind of subtle but notice that the surface of the paint seems to ramp up towards the edge and then quickly drop off as if the paint's peeling away from the surface I can use something like this cracks brush and then if you move the light you can see it looks like it's peeling away now if you want the effect to be more extreme you can go to the paint height layer and increase the height and now we get a really extreme paint peeling effect so if I exaggerate it you can see what I'm talking about now what if we want the paint to actually be sort of faded along the edges we can do that I'm going to go back to the paint height layer and right now there's only height on this layer so I'm going to change it to also have color and just to demonstrate I'm going to change it to some crazy color like bright green and you can see that anywhere I paint the edges will be bright green but I'm going to choose kind of a faded blue color and again remember remember that this is totally Dynamic so as long as I'm painting underneath the paint mask Anchor Point that we created you can just sort of paint in real time and get that really cool Dynamic effect this also works incredibly well for things like engraving so if I just turn on my Anchor Point and it just gives us some more interesting highlights to look at and of course it's still totally Dynamic another thing it's really good at is scar tissue and other really cool organic skin details like that so check this out I'm just going to sort of lightly paint here and you can see I get a really nice organic sort of nasty recently healing wound so if I press really hard I can see the under layer but notice that the edge is kind of bumpy and nasty and stringy looking so it's actually really simple so I set it up exactly like I did with the paint but if I look at my scar edges layer which is the same thing as like the the paint height chipping effect notice that I have my Anchor Point and then the high pass filter and then the levels just like before but then I added a warp to sort of crunch it up and a blur to make it more soft and organic so once you kind of get the hang of anchor points and what they do you can do some really cool interesting effects one last really cool example that I use it for is burned cloth and paper too so it doesn't have to be just about height I can use it to change the color I am changing the height here but I'm using to change the opacity of stuff changing the color and I'm actually driving two layers so you can layer up effects you don't just have to have one interesting height layer you can see I've got a chart edges and a burned edges so the charred one is kind of this faded soft darkening and then I've got little tiny crunchy details driven by the exact same effect it might be kind of cool to also have like a glowing hot Ember along the edge too so if you have any other cool ideas for ways to use anchor points be sure to leave them in the comments below there are endless possibilities with this tool so I know that you guys can come up with some really cool ideas that I haven't thought of yet if you make anything cool with anchor points or the new updated drone textures be sure to tag us on Instagram with it or post it to our Discord alright later creators

Channel: ProductionCrate

Views: 163,454

Keywords: productioncrate, footagecrate, rendercrate, soundscrate, graphics crate, vfx, vfx artist, visual effects, visual effects artist, free vfx, free music, royalty free, royalty free vfx, royalty free music, after effects, adobe after effects, adobe ae, 3D, 3D modeling, free 3d models, after effects script, free after effects script, film, filmmaking, independent filmmaking, substance painter, adobe substance painter, realistic 3d textures, 3d textures, realistic 3d, 3D tutorial

Id: 0_1VOFF0LJk

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023