Tutorials
Texture painting for production
01 Prepare your MODEL
Before sending it to Substance Painter, we first need to unwrap our model and organise our UV tiles in UDIM as presented in Fig 1. The UV sets define the order of your UDIM, as they also do in Mari.
I start colour coding my objects with physical materials in mind. Let’s create as many Lambert shaders in Maya as the amount of physical materials our model should have.
02 colour code your MODEL AND export
Rename the Lambert shaders you just created, with the name of the materials you want to paint in Substance Painter. Now apply those shaders to the relevant parts of your model as shown. The naming conventions used in the Maya Lambert shaders establish shading hierarchies and will help you to produce ID bakes within Substance Painter.
Export your model. I normally use the OBJ extension (make sure ‘Including materials’ is checked).
03 create A New Project in substance Painter
Go to Substance Painter and create a new project. In the initial menu under Template, select ‘PBR – Metallic Roughness Alpha-test (allegorithmic)’. In File, bring over your OBJ file exported from Maya. Check ‘Create a texture set per UDIM tile’ and then choose the resolution of your textures.
04 hdri Light settings
Change the default environment for the HDRI of your choice. Make sure it is the same HDRI you will be using in Maya and V-ray to produce your final renders.
05 bake initial MAPS
I used to bake AO and Normals in Maya or Toolbag
and Tension in Max, in order to have the perfect template to paint over my textures. Now I have those and then some, with the complementary passes created when baking maps inside Substance Painter (World Space Normal, ID, Curvature, Position and Thickness). Find your texture set settings and bake mesh maps.
06 initial Materials
Thanks to Substance Painter, we can solve the look of our materials directly in our textures. This is helpful when sharing your work among programs like Maya or 3ds Max. You can use the same maps, in the same shader channels, as long as they share the same render outlet. For this artwork, I’m using a six-map setup: Diffuse, Reflection, Glossiness, IOR, Normal and Opacity.
07 Materials AND Layers
Select the material you want to start with from the texture
set list. Pick a material from Shelf>materials or Shelf>smart materials (let’s say plastic matte), and add another material on top as a second layer or group of layers (let’s say aluminium pure).
08 Masks
Pick a mask from Shelf>smart mask and drag it over your top layer (let’s say stain scratches).
Now that you have a decent template, start painting over the mask to make variations.
09 ADD Detail to our Masks
Pick the mask applied in your top layer material, right-click and select Add paint. Pick the Paint sub-layer you just created and start painting customised hand-free shapes over the initial mask.
10 PAINT with ALPHAS
Add customised alpha shapes and brushes for fixing or adding detail. Drag external downloaded alphas or black and white vector art to your shelf. Finally, paint the designs you want in your props like brands, logos or masks in colour separations. You can also add a bitmap mask if you already have pre-painted masks you want to apply to a complete texture.
11 use Projection
Click the projection icon in your main toolbar and add prepainted masks to the Grayscale channel in the ‘Properties – Projection’ tab. Now you can paint with pre-designed images and the same principles as the paint buffer provided in Mari.
12 FINAL Material structure
To produce our final layered material, let’s think of it as an onion. You have to peel through layers of stuff to get to the centre. Now, think of the centre as your base material, let’s say Chrome, and all the peeled layers are scratches, dust, heavy dirt and mud.
The great thing about Substance Painter is that it gives us masks to separate each of these overlapping layers, as well as blending modes like Photoshop’s to make them react in a customised fashion.