What You Get Wrong About Smart Materials in Substance Painter

hey guys Henny I'm working from flip normals here in this video we are going to be talking about smart materials in substance painter and how people are pretty much abusing the system and not using it to its full potential at all what we're seeing a lot is that you have people who they get our hands on painter and they just start going crazy you know they they go in and they just drag and drop some smart materials onto their objects and they're looking at this mean like this is super cool and and yeah yeah it is super cool these materials which ship with painter they're phenomenal but one of the problems is particularly if your student is that we've seen this actually where you can actually identify which smart materials different people are using so if you if you're reviewing a show reel which has textures or game reel or whatever it might be now you if you were hiring a texture artist you don't want to be able to identify what presets they're using because you're not hiring somebody for the purposes of dragging dorfli smart materials drop a mask and go that's yeah that's it if an asset took you five minutes to paint you know you know it's gonna put that in a wheel so this here is is kind of to talk about that talk about smarting to your abuse and leave the smart material alone yeah how to how to use more hand painting and observation and more storytelling instead of just go crazy drag and drop yeah just like each I mean we've talked about these things a lot um but you know each object that you're texturing or you're sculpting or whatever you're doing to it has a story and it's very important to try and convey that story in whatever you're doing there's a reason why if you use the machinery smart material that it looks like that but it's not gonna apply to all objects because not all objects have been through the same stuff know exactly there's such a big difference if you have it's a brand new fire hydrant or it's a fire hydrant which has been in for 60 years yeah it's not the same one so I mean I'm all for using materials or smart materials as a base because I mean why redo something which is already been done if you can get a base of steel by dragging steel and I mean cool yeah that's a great start but we're gonna be looking at something which a lot of people screw up which is you know the makeup they makes on a basic material like this to make some red paint to make it make it pretty shiny to make gives them some height and now you go and you make a mask for it we assume you know all this if you don't we have an introduction to painter coming out very soon so this is this is the starting point see a bunch of people get to where you know they have they have an acid and very quickly you know essentially within 30 seconds you can get something which it looks it looks pretty cool but clearly it's not done you see here that the distance between all all the all the curvatures here is exactly the same and everything just looks very uniform and that's because it is because it's based on a character map which is uniform this doesn't take anything into account such as the storytelling this purely looks at the curvature maps and makes a material or make some masks out of that yeah and this is what this video is about trying to get away from relying too much on everything being procedural procedural Ness is awesome for iterations but not everything needs to be completely 100% iterative like I mean most of what we do needs to be bespoke so starting off with a base that's procedural is amazing because it means that you can get up to a really high level really quickly and then you're supposed to do your job afterwards exactly and if you're in a project and you've got a texture of a bunch of different objects which are similar you have 40 fire hydrants and you need to attach them I mean definitely spend some time on making the procedural element as good as possible yeah but then afterwards then you go in and you add individual variation so for this one for this thing here to exist in real life like this that's somebody has gone over and scraped off perfectly perfectly and then it's been out in the weather and just had a tiny bit of variation to it yeah this stuff just doesn't look like something like this stuff has variation and we I think we mentioned this before in one of our videos but when we went to Hong Kong some months ago now we saw this with a lot of a lot of statues people have been touching their feet at heads and certain points and they were far shinier in those areas yeah and that's purely storytelling that's because people believe but touching these areas it brings him luck or whatever it might be so first you've got to think about the story of your object like there's a fire hydrant bring you good luck if you keep rubbing it on the top exactly there might be there might be two things like that yeah so let's look at some specifics what we're talking about so first off whenever you're doing this I would just go in out of paint layer and then just clean up the mask certain areas you can see here that there is still like remnants left off off the red material on the very metallic chains here so we can use this tool to just drag and drag and fill in these layers this is a really really cool tool so set this to set this to the polyfill mode mesh fill mode and then we can just start to drag in you see what it's doing it just takes a polygon object and fills it and excellent for cleanup absolutely because you know you most likely don't have spill of paint on in these areas right at the tip of the chains not so then we can go back in again and we let's just check video shelf back because you need to use brushes for this so one brush I really enjoyed using this brush to all the buttons the dirt brushes are pretty good you don't want to use something like the soft brushes for this because this is just too generic do you want to have something which has some bit of texture in it like this yeah and then like you consider you consider different parts of the in this case fire hydrant you know the base might be more damaged because people kick it or maybe there was a car that ran into it and from the side ones a lot of people worked around the valves if they need to open and close them a lot so you know those areas might be more damaged because there's been wrenches and stuff around it yes areas which would be damaged will be around around here like this here I mean obviously there's more simple example you wouldn't have perfect metal and then just paint you would have bunch of dirt and grime yeah and then some of the steel would be rusty now so but this is just to have a clear example a simple example showing you that you really just have to go in and add variation to our stuff would be so for instance around around this this area you know you can probably paint it all the way maybe there is some variation there but it really wouldn't be a whole lot yeah not this perfect perfect circle of exposed yes deal yes so what you might see is that let's say this side here is facing the street there might be more rust in this area or maybe the paint is more broken because there's been cars have have gone in and it splashed water onto it yeah and then like on some sides maybe where the valves are you would have some kind of dripping like so that would create rust and some grime as well also it depends heavily if this here were to be in New York City or in a place like San Diego where you know it's the the rain is just vastly different yeah son so one one hydrant it could be the exact same hydrant from the exact same factory would have a lot more sun damage there won't have more water and frost damage for instance yeah and then that's again another thing like you want to consider okay in terms of sun how much Sun does it get and where does it get it from it wouldn't be equal everywhere it's like when you you got and like look at these old recycle shops and stuff they always have these for some reasons blue posters in the store just because the Sun has damaged so much that blue is the only color that remained obviously that's not gonna happen as much they're like a heavy-duty paint like the one you see on a fire hydrant but you might still see paint starting to fade and you might see some chipping on the paint on one side because it's got more Sun there so it's it's there's a lot of stuff to consider it's not just like are there's a fire hydrant like anything's doing here like okay here's the chain that Shane has probably been rattling in this area that's why the paint has started to chip off more there that makes sense yeah you really just got to think about a story I really like to think about texture painting as when you're painting textures you're not just you know just defining materials you're painting a story and every single object has a story maybe the story is it's a broadening iPhone from a Chinese factory that's that's still a story and that would show that it's brightening or it could be an iPhone which is foam ten stories down is absolutely smashed yeah what do you have to think about like you can think about it like this that each object whether you're doing a hard surface or you're doing organic like you're doing characters or stuff it's it's the same thing like they they have a personality you know their personality in terms of the objects is just what's the environment they've been in how has that affected them what kind of fire hydrant has it become now you know is it an angry depressed teenage fire hydrant or you know so there's a lot of factors that play in romance just got out of its Paramore phase so alright let's try to obviously pretty shitty paint job here but you know we just we just want to break it up a bit more and make it feel a bit more realistic yeah because individual variation is really the name of the game when it comes to when it comes to texturing I can't stress how important it is and what you think about is for something like this maybe this used to be a yellow fire hydrant so maybe there's multiple paint layers you know and then some parts of the steel is newly exposed so that would be more shiny and steel like other parts have been exposed for a long time so maybe they're rusty so there's a lot of stuff that you can go through it's not just okay let me just because I think one of the issues is a lot of people think about especially for a metallic object like this let's say it's one layer of paint and then it rusts no no this is so so wrong like it rusts in different stages and not all the paint wears off at the same time you know it's it's there's so much variation that you can that you can think about and add to your to your objects it's not going to be the same everywhere I really you're doing this adding just multiple layers off like here yeah maybe it was painted yellow underneath you can paint yellow yeah and that's a cool thing there as well like you have the additional bump underneath where you can still see you know some stuff you could have that being like the the bubbling of of the paint when it sort of starts to come off because of too much Sun so just like it starts to have oxygen in there this little like rises a little bit exactly there's there's so many of these small little things that you can do to your objects to just give more life to them and then you can also supplement this with some materials here if you want rust some reason terrine with the wheel here would rust you know you can do this and you can put this under here maybe between these two yeah so now instead of instead of the metal maybe you're not just seeing straight rust or you could go in and do the same thing you know you could add a mask this hide all the rust and and just just try out different things you know you could paint and I can just get some of the rust back yeah so definitely don't just drag and drop smart materials on to whatever is you're doing think about the history of it and then you know use as a basis really use as a basis but think about the story try to the reference if you can can find a hole a reference for the specific kind of fire fire hydrant but you know source it from real life and source it from what the object has has gone through go find your own fire hydrant and you know maybe threaten it with a knife and like make you a story yeah I do this actually a lot whenever I go around yeah I know I go around the city and just take photos of materials particularly when prepping for it this painter video we'll be doing out introduction because then you can really just look at the differences in material you see this a lot specifically with metal which has paint on top of it just you can get some very interesting variation going on with that yeah so yeah that's that's basically it for this video if you want to see more of painter content let us know we'd love to love to hear your thoughts on that also one question I have or specific interest is do you guys have any cool brushes and a favor just like to use when you're painting because there are so many off them and I'm sure we can all figure out a good set of brushes to use here so yeah make sure to LIKE comment in the scribe get a notification button and we'll see you next time thanks for watching you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 155,572

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru

Id: xppOU2y10Cs

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019