Game-ready textures

Sébastien Giroux shows how to create beautiful textures for video game production using Substance Painter

Master Substance Painter for beautiful textures

This past year has been a game-changer for the video games industry and for us artists lucky enough to earn a living from making games. The emergence of physically based rendering (PBR) has changed the way we create textures and materials for game engines, and with it, software has emerged that you need to master. In particular, Substance Painter has become a standard in the industry; it’s a terrific software that is a part of the Substance Designer suite. In this tutorial we’ll learn the core skills needed to create real-time, gameready textures in Painter.

Photoshop has been a staple of my workflow for years but Substance Painter offers some major gains to stray from its path, for example instead of texturing with photos on a flat 2D canvas, you are now able to ‘paint’ on a 2D canvas. At the same time, Substance Painter offers you the ability to do this in a 3D viewport.

One of the mindblowing abilities of the software is it enables you to texture in multiple channels (albedo, glossiness, metalness) at the same time and then you can reuse this materials’ recipe quickly on other 3D models, in seconds.

Texturing a series of vehicles, props or characters that are part of the same theme or factions with similar material types becomes an easier task as you can reuse the same materials across all of them. Texturing has never been quicker and it’s easy to use all of this while maintaining the PBR accuracy. And it doesn’t stop there. One of the many great things with Substance Painter is the ability to use the colour ID map that is generated from Zbrush and baked into Substance Painter. This can be used as a mask for materials/texture applications baked from the highresolution details in Zbrush.

The other great thing is you can now bake normal maps by name – you don’t need to break up your low-polygons (LOD0) in order to bake them. So you can avoid a projection overlap in your normal maps, as the two geometry objects are too close together – even at a low ray distance value. This avoids having to make corrections in Photoshop, which can be a pain. For all the assets you need go to creativebloq.com/vault/3dw208