Substance Painter - Basics Allegorithmic Tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-toy9WMImypmLAiU9h_SzQ

Substance Painter - Basics

What is Substance painter? Substance painter is an advanced texturing package which allows you to paint directly onto you model and the Uvs at the same time. It works very similar to photoshop in terms of the layer stack system, however, there are more advanced techniques such as the use of materials and masking to achieve high quality results quickly. It differs from photoshop because you will paint on all channels at once, such as diffuse, specular, normal etc.

Template covered on next slide! New project You will need to import an FBX file and select your document resolution. However, the texture resolution can be changed at any point therefore this does not matter as much! You can also import the models baked maps such as normals. Template covered on next slide!

Template The template section is very important! PBR means physical based rendering and is only supported by particular renderers. Maya standard does not support PBR by default, however, renderers and plugins will allow PBR support such as Arnold renderer. Maya uses Non-PBR spec gloss as default but many of substances features will not work for this set up. Substance exports to Unreal, Unity and Sketchfab really nicely!

User interface

Texture Set This is the list of shaders you have applied to your model. Each shader should have its Uvs laid out in the 0 to 1 region. Each shader will export its own texture set. A texture set will include all textures such as diffuse, metal, rough, normal etc. Therefore if you have 3 shaders applied to your model, you will export 3 diffuse textures, 3 normal maps etc. Using more materials allows you to maximise the texel density of your models to give you more resolution on your textures and therefore more detail, however, it will load more textures and therefore be more memory intensive.

Layers Layers work exactly the same as Photoshop. You have blending modes, opacity, masks and everything else you would expect. Fill layers work as a layer which floods the layer with whatever you wish. You can flood with a smart material, a colour etc. These are typically used with white or black masks. The layers also allow you to go into a particular texture channel, such as the normal map, or the specular map and ONLY paint values for that channel. For example you could go in and only paint normal information to add bump texture to your model!

Masks You can right click any layer/group and add a mask to that. This allows you to exclude / include certain information. A white mask and a black mask are essentially the same. Black = will not be seen. White = will be seen. For example If I had an axe I could add two fill layers; one wood smart material and one metal smart material. I could then add a white mask to the metal fill layer and then paint out the wood areas black. Or I could add a black mask to it and paint the metal areas in white. Use whatever is easiest for you. You can always invert a mask.

Viewer settings is mainly to do with the lighting that you are viewing your 3d model in. Have a play around with the settings if you wish!

Display Settings This is to do with the camera settings, you probably won’t need to alter these! Post effects can be interesting, particularly if you are using the renderer within Substance, however, will be lost once it has been exported!

Paint Properties These are your brush settings. On the top left is the preview of your brush. This is how the paint would be applied. You have settings such as size which is how big the brush is; spacing which is how far apart the applied paint is, opacity which is how transparent the paint is and many more. <<<<<<<<< >>>>>>>>> As well as the brush settings you also have material settings for your brush. This dictates the information you will paint, for example the colour something is, how shiny something is, the normal map detail etc.

Shelf The shelf is a big bank of various different assets. You can import your own assets here as well. You will use things such as alphas for your brushes, different smart materials, different normal maps etc. All of these assets can be brought into the brush in its relevent channels! Have a play around with them!

Tools Tools are along the top. These are fairly common tools such as the paint brush, eraser, projection, polygon fill, smudge, clone stamp and others. Polygon fill is really useful when selecting areas of the mesh, it allows you to select by polygon, uv shell, object and more. Quick mask: If you press ‘T’ you can create a quick mask allowing you to paint in a particular area without spilling into areas you don’t want. If you press ‘I’ it will invert the mask. If you press press ‘y’ it will cancel the mask.

Baking in Substance is awesome Baking in Substance is awesome! You can bake all different types of information which will affect the way your model is painted. This is where you would bring your high resolution mesh in to bake your normals. The best thing about this is you can bake by mesh name. This will search for two mesh names such as barrel_low and barrell_high and then bake those areas seperately to the rest of the mesh. This eliminates objects being baked onto one another when multiple meshes are used.

Iray Iray is a renderer you can use to save renders straight out of Substance. You render settings are on the right, tweak these to achieve the results you want.