Your Own Smart Materials - Beginner Substance Painter Tutorial

[Music] what's up creators so i'm sitting here doing a personal project and i came up with a cool tip for you guys for substance painter so i'm working on this character this is the concept art it's based on i found it online i thought it was pretty cool so i'm sitting here just grabbing some of these default metal materials that substance comes with and i'm just kind of bored of them you know so i'm going to show you guys how to make your own smart material so my goal is to make a metal with scratched edges with rust spots and some dirt and grunge so i went over here to production crate and in the graphics category under textures in the grunge category i just grabbed a few different concretes and dirts and rocks and rust you might be wondering why did i grab those and not pictures of metal you can make metal out of a lot of different things and i actually like to use pictures of concrete a lot for metal rather than pictures of metal because there's cool shades in it cool colors and hues too many people just make metal that's just gray just shades of gray and like cloudy scratched gray images but if you add a little bit of color to it it adds a lot of visual interest a lot of subtle visual interest so i downloaded those and i ended up using these five textures notice i did rename them substance painter has this weird quirk where if there's a four digit number at the end of your file it thinks it's part of a udim i just recommend getting rid of the little resolution number at the end of the file so these are my five textures i'm going to use so over here in my project i'm going to make a metal material for all this armor i'm going to create a new fill layer right here and i'm going to call this base metal down here in the properties we've got base color height roughness metallic and all that good stuff you can just sort of edit this directly if you want to maybe i'll crank up the metalness because that's what we're going for and you can see you very quickly get a really nice stylized metal but i want to go a little more realistic so let's import our textures and start dropping them in over here in the assets palette in the bottom right you can import resources i'm going to add resources and here's my five textures let's just go ahead and import those and it doesn't know what they are see it says unidentified so let's just highlight them and say these are textures and then down here where it says import your resources to you could do just the current session if you don't need them after you close the program you could do uh attach it to your project if you want it to follow your project around the different computers or you could add it to your library so it's a permanent part of your asset library i'm just going to choose current session for this one okay here's all of our textures so we can just start with the first one let's drag and drop this onto base color and i can see it's already looks a little more interesting doesn't necessarily look better yet but we can make some adjustments here first thing is i want to change the tiling settings because maybe this texture is too big or too small so here in the properties under scale i can increase it to make it tile more or i can decrease it to zoom in you'll notice that it starts to tile pretty noticeably if you go too small so i'm going to switch my projection method right here from uv projection to tri-planar gives you a little bit more randomness but i'm still going to zoom out a bit so we don't see the repeating pattern too much okay the next thing i want to do is lower the contrast metal is a very low contrast material so the difference between the dark spots and the light spots is way too big under here on my base metal i'm going to add an adjustment i'm going to choose add levels and right here you should see a histogram you should be familiar with this if you know photoshop or or after effects or anything like that and these bottom two are contrast i'll just bring those together if you bring them closer together on the left side you're going to get a darker metal and on the right side you're going to get a lighter metal so let's just do this and you can also adjust these sliders up here if you want to fine tune it a little bit we're just going to get kind of an interesting look perfect okay next thing i want to adjust is the roughness channel the roughness channel is your most artistic channel where you have most freedom let's say you're trying to make a gold material like a gold bar gold is just the color it is and obviously if you're making gold then the metallic slider has to be all the way up you don't really have a choice but with roughness you can tell the story is it fresh out of the mint is it shiny or are there fingerprints on it is it scratched so that's where the roughness channel comes in i'm going to grab the exact same texture and drop it into roughness right here perfect you can already see it starts to look a little bit more grungy the reason i use the exact same texture is so that these little spots of roughness line up perfectly with the color map i already dropped in now it looks a little bit too high contrast again it's too shiny in the shiny areas and too rough and the rough areas so let's add another levels adjustment and if i look here where it says affected channel i can switch that to roughness and bring the contrast down now roughness is interesting the darker it is the more shiny it is so if you want a really shiny metal bring them close together here on the left side if you want a less shiny metal bring them a little bit farther to the right like that if you want to increase the contrast between the shiny parts and the rough parts you just bring these apart and you can also play around with these other sliders like before if you want to view the roughness channel directly you can go up here to the right and switch to roughness and you can see the map remember that the dark parts are more shiny and the light parts are less shiny i'm gonna press m for material and that looks pretty good now let's drop the same texture into the height channel so we can get some more bump uh imperfections and variations quick note before i do that though take a look how the height channel is different from the other channels see how the metallic channel goes from black to white or if i look at the numbers it goes from zero to one the height channel is different zero is in the middle and it goes up to positive one and down to negative one and that allows you to have bumps that go in and bumps that go out but i'm going to start at zero and let's drop that same texture into the height channel like this now it looks crazy it looks like mud that's because the contrast between the deepest parts and the in the highest parts is way too high so just like with the roughness we want to bring the contrast together we want to bring the highest and the lowest points as close together as possible and we want to keep them near the zero range so near black so i'm going to add a levels adjustment and switch it to the height channel right there and i'm going to bring this way down almost to zero so that these two numbers are very close to zero you already see it looks pretty cool now i'm going to bring the gamma which is this middle one up and what that's going to do is sort of flatten out the surface but leave the deepest little pits so we get a material that looks like it was once perfectly smooth when it was first created and then these little pits started getting taken out of it now at this point we could actually experiment with dropping in our different textures if i go back to base metal notice i have these three channels with the same image dropped in i can just switch to the next one so let's drop grunge two in there and see what happens into all three of them that's pretty cool now you can see grunge one and grunge two over here they have different uh values one of them is lighter than the other so you can still make adjustments if you need to let's say i want to darken this down let's go to our levels base color levels and just darken it down it's not too bad let's try the third one so i'm just dropping in grunge three i actually like this one a lot if i go back to my base color i'm just going to brighten that back up a little bit kind of increase the contrast for some more visual variation i'm also going to add a saturation node i want to bring up the saturation to get more of those colors in there so it's not just gray so i'm going to click on my base metal let's add a filter and this is a blank filter there's nothing in it yet but if i click here i can search for hue or if you don't see that anything pop up you can search for hsl which is short for hue saturation and lightness so i'll click that on i'm just going to increase the saturation you can go all the way up just to see what colors are there it's actually kind of like a rainbowy effect which is kind of cool but let's turn that back down just a little bit if you press the c key you can cycle through all of your maps and if i look right here i can see there's my base color and there's some blues some green some red it's very subtle it's very low contrast but it does help make the metal look more convincing i'll press m to go back to my material and the next step is i want to create a layer for the edges i want to bring out some scratches and a worn down effect on all the edges of this metal so to create this metal edges i'm going to grab my base metal and duplicate it and i'll rename the new one metal edges so now all i have to do is make a lighter version and also a shinier version i'm just going to go into my base color and lighten it up it's going to lighten up the entire thing but remember we're going to we're going to isolate it to just the edges of the model in just a minute here i'm also going to go to roughness and make it a little bit shinier so it looks like they've been polished so let's just lower my roughness value now we actually have two metals that are almost identical but one's just brighter and shinier and if i hide it you can see it reveals the original metal underneath what we need to do is create a mask for the layers so i'm going to click on metal edges and right here and add a black mask and this is a mask just like in photoshop if you're familiar with that we have our layer and right next to it is the mask which is just a black and white image that reveals the the layer we could create a custom mask but substance actually has some pretty cool pre-made ones so let's just go over here to this little category this is your smart masks and i'm going to search for edge there's one called edge scratches that sounds promising let's drag and drop that onto my mask and you should have seen a change but if you missed it you can always alt click on your mask to reveal the black and white image that's driving it let's make some adjustments here what i want to do is get rid of some of these scratches i think there's too many in the middle of the plate but i want to reveal the edges of each object so if i click on my mask and then click here on metal edge wear this is called a generator it's what's creating the image i can increase the wear level you can see the difference it makes you can also adjust maybe the grunge amount let's turn that down and now it's focusing more on the edges which is what i'm looking for so let's increase the wear level but also increase the contrast to sort of tighten it up and keep it towards the edges we're creating a very stylized effect here if i press m for material i can see the result hopefully you can also press c to cycle through your maps and we can see the color it's a little bit lighter around the edges if i keep pressing c here's the roughness you can see it's darker on the edges which means it's shinier press m for material all right so we got our edges done let's do rust and then dirt and then we're all finished so i'm going to create a new fill layer above my metal edges call it rust and i'm going to go back to my textures here you can actually search for whatever you named your texture i named mine pea crate grunge so i'll just search for peat grate and it comes right back up so this is a fairly good looking rust material it's maybe a little too yellow i want to adjust it to be more red but it's basically what i'm looking for so let's drop this into the color and you can see it's not quite right yet we got to make some changes let's increase the scale so it's smaller let's also switch to tri-planar projection just like we did on the metal and before i do anything else i'm going to adjust the color make it more red like rust if i click on the rust layer and add a filter and then click here in the filter category i'm going to search for gradient gradient's cool it makes the image black and white and we can remap it to whatever colors we want so the darkest colors let's choose a nice dark red the mid tones let's choose a little bit lighter red maybe kind of orangey and then the highlights i'm going to do another shade of orange don't worry that it looks shiny at this point we're going to make some changes so just choose a nice two or three different nice rust colors back to our layer now rust is very not shiny it's very rough so i'm going to crank the roughness almost all the way up to one if we want to add some dimension to the rust we can plug it into the height channel as well but notice it gets a little too crazy so we're going to bring the contrast back together so on this rest layer i'm going to add a levels switch to height and then bring the contrast together near zero just we want just a little bit of bump on there i think i'm gonna crank up the scale as well just to make the chunks even a little smaller pretty good don't worry if you see too much tiling pattern because we're gonna hide most of this rust so if you start to see like a grid pattern it's not a big deal pretty nice looking rest let's add a mask to it so i'm going to add a black mask just like before i'm going to go to my smart materials and they have a really good rust mask here i just search for rust there's one called rust drips so i'll drop that onto my rust mask and you can see it actually looks pretty good right out of the box i might leave it how it is but let me show you how to adjust it if you want to adjust it click on your generator just like before and there's a bunch of sliders here for drips and spreading so if i turn down the spreading you can see what happens so there's these little rust spots and they drip downward and then they can spread out from there so we can adjust all that stuff i can adjust the drip intensity and that will make it sort of go back up i can adjust the smoothness and then the spread outward so i don't want to go too crazy with this i just want a few little rusty spots okay last step is i'm going to add some dirt so dirt goes on top of rust because it usually gets on the surface last right let's actually duplicate the rust layer and just turn it brown so it's more dirt like so i'm going to grab my rust layer ctrl d i'll name it dirt if i click on the layer then go into my gradient from before i can adjust these colors to be more brown maybe a little less saturated and now we just have to change the mask out so it's not dripping like the rust so if i click on the dirt mask right here here's the generator just press this little x that'll get rid of it and now i can search my smart masks for dirt so the one that i like is called dirt leak and drag and drop that onto my dirt mask and you can see what it did is it sort of crowded around the base of all this stuff which is really cool this is why we call it a smart material because it respects the actual geometry of your object you don't have to decide by hand where to paint it if you don't want to so if i alt click you can see that's where the dirt is accumulating sort of in the deep recesses around the base of things because they get touched less which is really cool so that's it that's the material but now how do we make it into a smart material that we can reuse on the rest of the model it's really simple i'm going to add a folder this little folder right here and i'll call this bore armor because my characters are bore you can call it whatever you want i'll grab my four layers here and drop them into the bore armor folder you can see right there i have a folder and all that stuff we did is inside of it i can right click on the folder and go create smart material so if you go into your smart materials library you should see the bore material or whatever it is that you created and you can actually just drag and drop this onto the other pieces right here sure to like this video to make it load faster and what's really cool is you'll notice that it will respect the new geometry so if i for example press c for color and cycle through my maps you can see that it's picking out the edges of this object so it's not based on the object that you created all the dirt is landing in the deep recesses of this object now if i scroll down to here you can see that these edges are now standing out so it's a really really powerful technique you can just create the material once and then use it all over the place so hopefully that saves you guys a bunch of time hopefully that makes your projects stand out from the crowd so you're not just using the same materials that everyone else is using whatever you create with this technique be sure to show us on instagram by tagging us there post it on discord post it in the comments and whatever you make make it awesome [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: ProductionCrate

Views: 62,162

Keywords: motiondesign, motiongraphics, compositor, visualeffects, motiongraphicsartist, motiondesigne, postproduction, videoediting, videoeditor, filmmaking, filmmaker, production crate, productioncrate, footagecrate, footage, crate, Stock footage, free stock footage, adobe, special effects, vfx, visual effects, fx, tutorial, tutorials, hitfilm, hit film, hit, film, 3d modeling, adobe substance painter, adobesp, video game modeling, 3d textures, 3d materials, smart materials, video game assets, 3d filmmaking

Id: AJT4S_DBKqg

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021