Zbrush to Substance Painter tutorial

all right so here's what we're going to do I'm going to show you how to take a model inside of ZBrush and get it prepared for painting inside of substance painter and this is like for lucky you have like some really super high polygon count and you want to be able to paint it inside substance painter so I have a model here that I made which is this fish and this has three sub tools in it the fish itself yeah these fins and these fins so there's a couple different ways you can go about this the first is you can merge all these together and make one object out of it but let's say I want to show you how to deal with multiple sub tools because you might have an object with a ton of sub tools and you want to have all those have different materials on it so we'll just say for the sake of argument that we want this fish body itself to be one material and this fin to be another one and this offend to be another one there probably wouldn't be a very actual thing you would actually do you'd probably either merge these together do something like that in fact I might merge these two fins together just makes up two sub tools out of it and right now let's see what we have for subdivisions so this is how many subdivisions and it has its 1 million polygons this one has 600,000 and this one actually has subdivisions so I will show you how to get the fish body like this to where you can go from high below subdivisions this other one I think is the same way for subdivisions so when this thin is it its lowest subdivision for look at this fin right now we zoom in on it he says pretty low and this is a hundred thousand polygons that looks pretty good and then 1600 here so we could probably use this as it's set up right now but the main thing that we're going to look at is this fish body will get this to behave the same way so like you you sculpt something in here you know you might have started with the sphere like I did and like end up with a bunch of stuff and like the geometry might not be that great you know might be a lot of like weird little triangles here and there and stuff like that so typically what I do is I start by before I remesh this I am going to make a copy of it so I go over here I click on the fish body that's selected now and I go over to duplicate so now I have a copy of that fish body I'll get rid of these fins right now so I'll turn those off and we'll just focus on this okay so the first thing we're gonna want to do is we're gonna want to zremesh this so it's much lower poly count like it probably what you actually want for the finished thing so we'll go over here to geometry and zremesher and typically the way i set this up so we can see here it's five thousand Paul you got five thousand is the target that's going to target five thousand polygons so zremesher is going to do whatever it's going to do if we turn that off though it will target that élisa élisa actually just try this right now and see what it does so what's goes to remeasure and this will take a few seconds it's kind of big if your computer is kind of slow when you're doing this part of it you can also decimate this first I typically don't because even with the million polygons it goes fast enough probably the time it would take to actually decimate this would be about the same as just waiting for a secret message oh it's work so let's turn off this one so you see okay and now we're down to the 9000 so right here we had 5000 so it got somewhat close this looks pretty good I don't see issues typically if I'm going to like you know just be rendering this is a still scene I'll usually shoot for something a little higher than this just because my computer can handle it this would probably work fine though I don't see any problems with this mesh so let's just use that okay so now what we want to do is we want to like actually like make a high resolution version of this too so we can do that by subdividing and then Reap rejecting the old details on it so right now if I go here to geometry and hit divide it's going to give me a subdivision level it's gonna get smoother but it's not going to have any of the actual detail from that so if I go to another higher subdivision level it just gets smoother and smoother so you see the difference here between this and this is pretty drastic even though it's close to the same number of polygons about that so on this one let's go back to this will undo those subdivisions for now okay we're back to this so 10,000 polygons so what we'll do I usually like use hotkeys for this because I'm going to use this project button right here and what this does is I will be projecting anything as visible so I'm going to make this other body visible here so now we have one fish the high resolution fish that we originally sculpted underneath the new version of the fish I'm gonna hit control D to subdivide it and then I'm going to project all this will project anything is visible so make sure your other sub tools are not visible here that you want to project the detail only from that the original original model for that part so we'll project all and now you'll see that we've got a slightly higher subdivision that projected all the details from that this is still not quite high resolution enough so ctrl D again and project da and controls and you see when the example if you can see like where the differences are so this isn't quite like matching up this model yet so I'll hit control D again and project off I know we're way closer this is like not quite as many polygons as it was before 600,000 so he's gonna get one more time it might actually overshoot but that's okay too so projectile see how we know where to point four or five million doesn't really matter though it's gonna get real close to the original original projection if there's like places in here that don't match exactly and you're concerned about them I mean when I look at this this looks like almost identical to my original model except you see like the topology is a lot better when i zoom it now like you have like better better but our quads in here compared to the way it was before so to me this looks really good we're probably render it like you know probably like that or something like that so that to me it looks pretty nice so now what we have we could delete this original version of the model so can I delete that and we have this fissure so what this will allow us to do is unwrap it at its lowest subdivision level so we go back to this subdivision level one here so now we have this this will be like much easier to unwrap and for you to paint on and substance painter substance painter will actually bake that high resolution version of that fish back onto this so we'll get all the detail even though only have this number of polygons so the next thing to do is unwrap and the way you do that if you're just going to use the brush is and this plugin called UV master so I'm going to take this Z plug-in here anyway move it so I move it over to this sidebar so you can grab anything in ZBrush and like that little little icon there allows you to grab out the menu and you can let go and put it over here we're gonna use you view master a lot here so so it's just easier to have it over on the side it's supposed to going up here and you know messing around with this menu over here it's just a lot easier to have it open all the time okay so a couple things about UV master like first of all like when you have when you have like these multiple subdivision levels you'll want to work with the clone I bet you won't want to work directly on this model and UV master lets you do that by this button right here where it says work on clone says right there highly recommended they're not kidding in fact it would probably I don't know if it would work correctly if you didn't clone it in this particular situation it might but when I hit this work on clone it's gonna make clone of it changes the texture of it the reason for that is because you can do some control painting and things like that so one thing you can do is you can just immediately go here and say just unwrap for some stuff that might work my guess is with this one it's going to like not do a very good job of unwrapping it just from experience of using this so but like we'll go ahead and do that really quick just so you can see what happens so this would be the typical thing you would go and wrap now if we would have unwrapped this with a million polygons this would have been super slow and now finished really super fast it's this thing's lightning fast when you have like a optimized model like this so five seconds is all it took on my machine but now you have you've ease but like what do they look like you have no idea so there is this button over here it says flattened and this will flatten it out and surprisingly like this isn't this isn't not actually terrible in my opinion we could depending on what you're doing you can probably get away with this it looks like it made a cut right here that looks like it must be the back fin you can see all the detail here this is probably the head is like the gills right here yeah it's not terrible this is perfect and you can see how like it they've made some arbitrary cuts in some kind of strange places which like I said it depends on what you're doing if you're just doing some concept thing like what I do mostly like this would probably work fine we could actually test this out inside of here so you have to flatten first and you can cop so we're working on a clone this is not our original model so we write copy you v's and we go back up here and we're going to find our original fish it's this one I believe yes so this is original fish and we can go here and we get paste the UV right on top of that that's we have that sub tool still selected get rid of this paint thing here we can go back to classic so if we want to see what that looks like so now we have UV there's some things we could do right here inside of ZBrush just to test it out there's this texture map over on the tools this we're in the tool menu and you can apply a texture map to it and I'm going to apply a texture 19 which is this kind of classic UV texture map and it will do it so yeah you can see this is it actually is an ideal now it will look at it like you can see how this is stretched a lot compared to this area here depending on what you're doing that may be kind of a deal it's just going to be like you know if you use like a image map or something like that it's going to stretch those out there and it's me it may be a parent it depends depends on what kind material you're a lay down this you could always you always try it and see you see if you like it but I'm gonna show you a way to kind of make it better unwrapped of this so we'll turn this texture and we're back in subtool they were fish selected and we'll go to UV and we'll say work on clone again now we have a new clone of this mmm and oh actually okay so one thing there's a few different things you can do so one is is that you have this enable control painting so if you remember in that last one you saw how like it split off one of these fins to the outside you can you can actually like enables control painting and say protect here and you can say I and you can start painting on this so if I start painting on this it's going to basically tell UV master hey like don't don't mess with this right here right or whatever or maybe you want to say I want to attract to a certain place so I want to attract it you know there actually actually maybe better just say like oh I want to attract it up here so my experience with this is it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't once you start getting into this kind of this kind of area where you're like actually like trying to paint like the actual seams on here where you want it to where you want to unwrap like I if I hit that point you might as well let's take it into blender or something like that and unwrap it yourself but that's just me this let's see what happens when we do this this might work but I only show you the third way which is even like even better than this so we will unwrap that six seconds and we get flatten it and oh that actually is a lot better we actually might be able to live with this one but I will show you a third a third thing you can do to have you more control over this so it's on flatten it let's copy the you v's let's go back to our original fish well paste the UVs and we'll go back down here and we'll go to the texture map and we'll do this and you can see like already like yeah that is a lot better that's actually pretty darn good yeah all the seams are going to be up here along that fin I'm actually surprised at that well done on the bottom so if you're going to be rendering this you know from his side you'll have no problems whatsoever texturing this you know if you wanted to you could there's ways you could edit this like if you wanted to like like you can't actually tell like exactly where to cut so you couldn't cut this and then like with straighten these out or anything like that you'd have to take this another piece of software to do that because these things can be scaled use a transpose tool go here and you can like scale scale this up or down you can rotate like that confuse with this thing yeah anyway if you really into the transpose tool you can get into that anyway that's if you wanted to do that I'm going to show you this third thing you can do though let's go back to our original here's some tool let's get rid of this texture map again okay so back to this okay so you have this let's say like you actually wanted like this head to be a separate UV map just to say argument there might be a lot of different reasons like if you're like doing a human or something like that you wanted like separate the arms out from the head and things like that you wanted to like have all those be their own separate island the way you would do that do I have so I have symmetry on if it's not on for you and you have a symmetrical model you X like right now it's it's on okay so the way you do that is basically draw it and ask on something by holding down the control key see I have mask on and I can select this stuff now if you want to go even faster you can go brush go mmm and do math lesson and hit okay on that and now when I hit control it's going to give me this lasso so I can go here I get pretty precise with this and say let's say I went this right here so I have that math stuff let's say I want that to be its own island I don't think he would actually want that but let's just say for the sake of argument you do and this is gonna give you control of where the actual seams end up being more or less so when you have that selected you're gonna hit ctrl W and it looks like it did nothing because we don't we weren't showing our polygroups basically what I just did is make a polygroups now you can see this this part of the head is now its own polygroup and i can continue to do that I can go and mask for instance the spin off and let's say I what that to be its own island a little more precise here say that's its own island right and I'll say I want this to be its own island control W Civ and this its own Island W and let's just say maybe I'll turn off turn off that lasso and just then just draw this in and just say like maybe down here won't like create another island just so it kind of splits it up control W that's another Island yeah no that's not okay so now we have all these different islands seas a little actually these will actually work with UV masters so not in good here I can go clone once again clone I'll show my poly groups here and then I just need to turn this polygroups thing leave symmetry on this is symmetrical model we've turned off up to you and we unwrap this and now flatten it and now you can see this gave every single these pieces its own island it looks pretty good I can probably go over here and flatten and see what this looks like the texture on it again texture that's the wrong one texture 19 and honestly that person was better but and a lot of cases this is going to be better where you have you kind of give you a mess or some hints about like what you want the different different pieces to be okay so I think for our purposes I am going to go with that second one that we made which I believe is we have on there right now since I didn't copy and paste that last one yep this is a this is the one here this one looks good to me so I'm going to go with that one okay so now we have to do these and this is going to be exactly the same thing these are actually going to be a lot easier so we'll start with this one we'll go work on clone we have this these already have already have some poly groups in them so we could use those but I think I'll just unwrap these and see how it goes yeah let's just unwrap them put the poly groups so symmetries on pull yours we won't have to do anything special here I don't think we could just go and wrap and flatten yeah so this had polygroups on those edges that's not very good that's it's probably fine but I'm flattened I want to turn on polygroups and just it we'll be able to figure this out on its own without the polygroups flatten and this looks okay to me but let's go ahead and then flatten and then check it out with an actual texture map so texture 19 and there's a little tiny bit of stretching honestly probably not going to notice that depending on like what kind of text you were doing it's not bad at all it's actually deep be good so good we'll copy that copy these go back up here get our original model and then we'll go paste juvies and it doesn't taste the texture so we'll have to go back here and do this again texture 19 all right so now we got that one yeah obviously you have like a lot more density down here because you're like giving it a whole UV space just for these two fins compared to like this whole fish getting like one UV space but that's cool that might not be the case if you're doing something like a little more realistic than this like I would have just merge these together it's one big model but anyway now we have this one so we'll just do the same thing work on clone unwrapped super fast flatten that's probably fine and flatten texture man textual texture 19 all right looks good this is kind of weird here like this right here got cut so you know you could go back and do what I showed you before and like and like use that control painting and say like you know try to put the seam there you know do it or if you're really concerned about like I said you could just take this into another piece of software and like they actually like telework but the seams then wrap it manually like this would be pretty easy to unwrap and blender or something like that but I don't know it's just it's just so simple like once you get the hang of this workflow just to do it all in the ZBrush especially if you just concept you really quick you want to get it super fast in the substance painter and see what it looks like what you know what the material on it or whatever so I'm actually gonna leave it like that because probably like the kind of stuff I do I'm probably gonna use try plan your projection that seems not going to really show up anyway so yeah they're there so anyway I'll copy it go back to this one and paste it down there make the rest my sub tools visible hit F and that will like bring us back out to see the whole thing and that looks pretty good so now what we have like I said before we had the spin and this vent already had subdivision levels so we can go here we can like crank them all up this is our D on four so what we'll do first of all we'll go ahead and export our lo model so I only put the subdivision levels down on all of these and fish okay everything's on one okay so my experience with substance painter is is that it likes to have the different parts being named correctly in order to bake these normal maps so what I do is I rename all these and this is the really stupid part of this I'm sure there's a better way to do it but let's just say body and ring call it low right and this and then this one we'll call it that was actually this side so we'll call this one rename fish and I'll show you in substance painter why we put that underscore low there it'll make sense when we get there rename one thing before we get into this fully let me just like talk a little bit about this too and that UV master when you say work on clone and then you been able to control painting it has some cool stuff here like you can like you can use control painting to control the density that the Texel density of like any part of your model so let's say you like one I'd like that I to not have as much resolution you could you can say you know give it a half the resolution of everything else you could paint that on and then it will give more density to the rest of your model so if like you have parts of it that are like hidden or anything like that or like for instance like you're only going to render the front of this you could like you could lower the density over here and that way you give yourself more resolution over here so if you're using like you know only a 2k texture map person like that you could get most of that 2k texture map on this side I didn't show that because when I do that but so yeah and then there is you could do multiply say I want a higher density in certain parts lower density the when we painted on those lines that's held to attract and protect different areas you can also do a track from ambient occlusion so it would say like you're probably looking like this does Gil here and see that like there would be a lot of ambient occlusion in that area and try to put the seams there probably try to put the seams like in between these fins and things like that like so you can there's a lot of things you could do with this but but like for what I showed you already is like like most of it anyway so now we have this model first thing I'm gonna also get rid of these textures now because we don't necessarily need them anymore so let's go here texture so I have I have my system setup of custom menus here I'm just I'm actually just using the default menu so I don't confuse you with my custom staff but like you can there's ways you arrange all this stuff to make all this kind of action a lot faster there's also some plugins that will do repeat and stuff for you but I'm just showing you how to do it with the built-in default menus so we got a sub : the fish turn the texture off which is a texture map with texture and text drop okay so we could turn these pull our groups off too and let's just do that again okay so here's our little model so I know they like to get this into substance painter got to export it so the best way I found is to use this FBX exporter also in plugin menu for some reason I don't know why this is a plug-in and not just part of it UV master the same way I don't know why it's a plugin it comes standard with it you don't have to install these or anything like that okay so I usually do smooth normals on here I do visible it's going to export all this together each one of these is a different material set and usually the defaults here fine there's some other options here if you want to get fancy with it I usually don't need it sometimes but not usually anyway so many just export this and I'll create a new folder here so and I'm going to rename this it takes the first subtool and gives it that's the name is going to give it I'm gonna call this official Oh instead of the actual part of it here so you save that and I should only take a few seconds okay so now we'll do the high version so what we'll do let's go to the fish geometry crank it all the way up to the highest subdivision and I know for a fact there's a plug-in that will take everything and put the highest subdivision before you go search for that on the pixel logic site and those I take the fins I'm way to take that first one crank up the highest this one shown tree dies okay so now we are all some visuals for both those spins and the fish so this will be our high resolution version of it and then we just need to rename these rename body this is one of those ridiculous things in ZBrush the way you do things you can just click on it there apparently they actually go down there so this will like help substance painter figure out like how to bake the normal maps individually without like letting the rest of the body interfere with like the fins especially where they overlap and stuff if we didn't do this it would still bake but you would get like I don't know like weird artifacts and stuff like that here where it's trained to like bake this body onto this fin and vice versa so you would get like weird normal map stuff going on there and doing this even though it's kind of a pain will help you avoid that issue yeah I think that is just about it for that so we can go here and when you go export and fish okay this is going to take a little while longer because no two napping polygons apparently take a little while to save okay that exported so now we can close this close that we can go over to substance painter substance payer just get this arranged a little bit better here okay so we're in substance painter and here is how I do this so I typically will go to new and I'm going to select zebrafish seven tutorial and you want to load the low-polygon version of the fish this is one we're going to work on so open that and the only two big settings you have to change here and for this particular workflow since we don't we don't have normal maps or anything baked already so we're just going to change the resolution I always say let's just say what's due to K if you really wanted to go crazy go for K my really high resolution was due to for our purposes I typically am going to be rendering this in blender maybe Houdini in both cases OpenGL for the neural map format is great you can always change this later on doesn't work for whatever renderer you're using you just look up but no map format that uses but that's pretty much it we just do that and then we thought okay this compute engine space per fragment exactly what this does but I think you would click this normally for if you're doing unreal or unity or something like that not sure anyway okay now we have her fish and this looks pretty good in here the low-resolution version of it and you see it kind of smooth things out even though it's like a low-resolution those normals are already smooth from the FBX export so in substance painter the first thing that we need to do is we need to bake that high resolution version onto this low resolution version the way you do that and this is this also bakes a whole bunch for their Maps like curvature thickness occlusion they'll leave a new thickness if you're like you're going to be doing like subsurface scattering and stuff like that and typically owls bake all those Maps because you'll use those like later on in the texturing process for various mess and things like that but this will also bake the map for you so the way this is is you click that big mesh maps over here and then you have high definition meshes and that's what we're going to do right click this button or when I select fish hi open and then right go down here and this is where that whole thing with the high end low comes in it says right here high poly mesh suffix high low poly low and you would think that would be enough but you actually have to go here and you have to say buy mesh name the way you would do this otherwise like without having to do this is maybe like explode like the model out or something like that and then bake it and then bring them all back in not exploded I guess I'd be way to do it but that seems like such a pain to me this is just easier you just saved by mesh name high-low so it's going to look at like each piece and say like Oh does it have a high end low version each one it's going to match this up so it can actually do this so we have we're going to bake three sets of texture Maps because each one of those fins is going to have its own and the body is going to have its own Souls bake all right here and this will take a little bit but once it's done you'll see you like all that detail come back in you'll see especially like around these fins and stuff like that like we're right now it's not showing any of that detail from the actual scope see right there just popped in so that baked that normal and map right in there so now what we end up with is a model with I don't know somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 gongs something like that that looks like the model that we had that was like a couple million right total yeah so there's this actually looks pretty good I don't really see any major issues with it and substance painter you could hold down I have this setup with my pen so I don't know what the actual keys are but there's shift in one of the mouse buttons will let you rotate the environment map on it but this looks pretty good and you'll see we can add some materials to see and get an idea of how those texture those UV maps actually worked out you add this to the body let's just see what that's just some random texture and look at that it looks pretty good and like it you know like in the areas where like you know there was some weird stretching and things like that or like maybe the direction isn't great you can always like go for you can always go for I'm using try planar projection so like I'll show you that in this event because I think it was this fin that had that seam right here let's get like a texture will be able to see that seam let's say like something look like wood grain and you're sitting like that like this should work so it's liked cuz I think it was a sight pin that was like that that's actually tip renaming those wrong that's funny there it is this is that problem I was talking about so now you have the seam right here you can see it in fact I was out of paint layer and just drop just in case you can't see it on the video so right here that's where that seems that and yeah that's not ideal obviously but it's not a big deal because in this particular case you can use try planar projection which will just use a different mapping it's going to kind of ignore like those seams and it's going to like map it based upon the space here and there's a much different transformation of stuff you can do when it comes to that that mapping you can you know obviously scale this still rotation offset all that stuff and it looks pretty good so that's why I was saying like you know if you're just doing something really quick and you don't want to like actually like you know spend much time and wrapping stuff and all the rest of it this technique works pretty good I don't know what's going on with this down here on the body itself we can go try playing there probably fix that too yeah kind of I think this has something to do with the sexual texture map let's get rid of that one yeah so you see that's actually pretty nice and that's not even using try planar you'll see like it has a seam up here and stuff like that if you don't like that seam you can once again you can go here and you go to tray planar projection and now it's going to kind of blend kind of like project from obits different angles and kind of blend them together which is nice this hardness I believe you can see yeah watch watch right here on this that hardness is how it blends those maps together up there yeah so I mean there you go like this is pretty good I could see that there's like you know here is going to be a little bit like it I mean like you were going to render this from out of here or like it's going to be in the background or something like that or even if you're going to render right here I think it's like totally fine this would work great and you know we start getting to like masking layers and stuff like that if I create a folder here and let's say we're material and say and ask on that you start driving masks on this just get a better brush basic hard yeah so you can see that like these maps work great and if this is not high enough resolution for you you can go back over here and you can go to exercise 496 and I'll redo it and you see like that's like really super high resolution that's pretty sweet yeah and you can just go to town do whatever you're going to do with that and that's about it like maybe at some point I'll show the workflow of how to get this out of substance painter and into blender or like Houdini or something like that actually the whole workflow I didn't see brush you could actually do in Houdini as well you could take that model and you can get it into a lower quality version you got and wrap it in there and everything like that who do you have some nice tools for that it's a little more complicated but how you doing there you also show you how you would like do then wrap you manually and blender as well that'd be another option if you wanted to get like really super specific and also if like you know as far as like the rete apology goes the zremesher in this particular case is probably fine for almost every purpose but like you start getting into like a human body or something like that you might want to like use something else like either like do the rete apology and blender manually there's topogun you could do it in maya or whatever your thing is maybe I'll show I mean you'll read apology thing at some point to just show you how I do that when I need to do it but I would say 90% of the time I'm just doing something quick this is the way that I do it and I hope that helps you and whatever you're doing so that's it thanks

Channel: Mick Storm

Views: 17,532

Rating: 4.911602 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush, substance painter, uv maps, baking

Id: 4eklS43x0eU

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 13 2019