HOW DO I CREATE A TEXTURE FOR REDSHIFT IN ADOBE SUBSTANCE 3D SAMPLER?
Mike Griggs replies
Creating convincing textures is one of the most challenging skills to master in CGI creation. It can require both asset gathering and an understanding of how light reacts to specific surfaces. Thankfully there are so many resources that allow new artists, or experienced artists who are in a rush, to access ready-to-go materials with the click of a download. One of the best material resources is the Substance 3D Asset library (substance3d.adobe.com/assets).
The Substance 3D library allows artists to download materials formatted to be used with the Substance 3D suite of tools, such as the high-end Adobe Substance 3D Designer and Adobe Substance 3D Painter to Substance plugins that are used with most digital content creation applications.
Third-party render engines such as Redshift have built-in tools to convert Substance files into a format that can be used as a Redshift material. However, sometimes an artist would prefer to have the Substance file in a more straightforward image-based format. Although it does lose the ability to be customised through the Substance parameter interface, this method does allow an artist a simpler-to-manage image set that can be adapted in any software.
The easiest way to convert a Substance material into an image-based file is to use the Adobe Substance 3D Sampler application, part of the Substance 3D suite. As well as being an excellent starter application for material creation, Substance 3D Sampler can export Substance files into image-based formats such as diffuse and specular maps for colour and highlights. It can also create
more complex textures such as Normal and Bump maps, which can create 3D relief patterns on a model. The best thing about this export process is that Substance 3D Sampler helps the artist with a range of export options preformatted to a wide range of existing render and texture solutions.
In this tutorial, we will look at how to use Substance 3D Sampler to convert a material downloaded from the Substance 3D Asset library into a series of images which can be used directly within a Redshift material.