Texturing
Tools involving texturing such as Substance Painter, ZBrush, Quixel Mixer and more. Also covers properly set UVs, materials, and more.
- Model Preparation
- Creating your own textures for materials
- Preparing ID Maps in Maya
- Baking maps in Blender
- Substance Painter Tutorials
- Resources for Substance Painter
- Using ID Maps in Substance Painter
- PBR Tools
- How to use Smart Masks in Substance Painter
Model Preparation
It is important you have your 3D model ready before pulling into Substance Painter. Here are the requirements
Good UVs
Auto-unwrapping generally gets the job done with maybe some setting tweaks for UV packing. But you should NOT be editing the vertex positioning of the UVs. This creates not only texturing problems, but also lighting problems later!
Applied transforms including scale
Example: You take a cube. You stretch the cube on the Y-Axis. You export the cube without applying the scaling or generating new UVs. Now the cube's texture will be weirdly stretched.
Good Topology
We can go down various rabbit-holes on this subject. Here is a shorter one.
TIPS
- Consider a high and low poly version of your model for baking. What is Baking?
- The Importance of Texture Baking
- Have your modelling software and model open close by for quick edits
- An entire house as one model is fine, however, texturing that one model is bad. Break up the model into pieces (door, window, wall) and consider using REUSABLE pieces (one window model for all window models)
Creating your own textures for materials
About
This section involves creating your own textures for materials used in engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine. Often we use materials from Quixel Megascans, AmbientCG, Adobe Substance, or some asset pack, but it is worth knowing how to make your own textures.
The guides listed focus mostly on building what's called seamless textures, or textures that can tile over a large surface and in theory you would not be able to notice the seams that connect the texture. Here is an example (from Google):
Non seamless... Ouch!
Seamless (much better)
Getting Started
Prerequisites: Some familiarity with Photoshop will be helpful.
Begin with gathering a high quality photo of your soon to be texture. There are many, many guides on how to take the photo, but if you do not have a DSLR camera, an iPhone camera will still do great. Look out for things such as good lighting, no shadows being cast, and keeping your photo shot straight and perpendicular. Take many photos if possible for backups and references (e.g. find other tufts of grass, or turn over the wood plank, etc.)
Photoshop
These YouTube videos that will explain the process. Feel free to search more as well, or find one specific to the texture you are creating.
Base color textures:
Normal Maps:
Normal Map (generator)
Be careful of using generators. They are approximations based off the image received as input and the algorithms can't determine that your wood photo is actually wood.
Where to go from here?
This guide covers taking photos, editing photos into seamless textures, and creating normal maps. Consider researching other photoshop tutorials that cover maps such as roughness and metallic.
Other maps, such as shadows, ambient occlusion, cavity, can be generated in modelling tools like Blender or Maya. I recommend assigning these base color and normal maps to your modelling software's materials and producing these additional maps.
When completed, always test your maps and models in their final rendering destination. For SCiL, it is mostly Unreal Engine or Unity.
Preparing ID Maps in Maya
This is a quick tutorial by 3D Texture Geek showing how to prepare ID maps for materials in Maya (and also a technique for Substance Painter):
Baking maps in Blender
About
If you wish to bake material IDs, or any other type of baking (similar to what Substance Painter does) I recommend my favorite Blender plugin: BakeMaster.
If you wish to bake just material IDs without a plugin, that guide is below as well.
Textools was my previous favorite but for now it only works up through Blender 3.2 although some contributors have forked the project to make it work with newer versions.
Requirements
For SU students, BakeMaster can be downloaded here.
Most of these baking tools make use of Blender's Cycles engine (not EEVEE).
Tutorials
Bakemaster introduction
Baking just the ID map (no plugin)
Substance Painter Tutorials
Substance Painter for Beginners Tutorial
This is about an hour long video going over the basics for Substance Painter. The video starts with an overview of the UI and general layout of the application and slowly dives into more intricate features. For most people, this is a great intro.
EVERYTHING you need to know about SUBSTANCE PAINTER!
About 30 minutes long, this video along with its YouTube channel, is the BEST on the internet. However, it is fast-paced and I recommend a familiarity with Adobe Photoshop (or layer/mask based image editor) or have seen the hour-long video listed above.
You can also download the 3D model he uses within the video, just follow along with the instructions while watching.
Resources for Substance Painter
Lists of additional resources and supplements to Substance Painter. Feel free to add more.
ambientCG - Completely free pbr textures. Be sure to download the correct size for your needs!
Using ID Maps in Substance Painter
This is a useful tutorial by Alberto Cordero showing how to use an ID Map in substance painter:
PBR Tools
Normal Map Generator: https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/
ORM Texture Generator: https://www.flowkit.app/orm-generator
How to use Smart Masks in Substance Painter
Open your substance project
You can find the smart masks in the assets folder. It's a “rectangle with a hole” icon next to smart materials.
To show how to use the smart masks I will use this table as an example
This is how it looks before any smart mask applied
First select your smart mask drag and drop it in the layers tab
I choose moss for the table
The mask is already applied once dropped in the layers tab
If you click on "Mask Builder - Legacy" in the layers tab you can adjust the settings of the mask
For example, if you change level it would look like this
Before After
To add textures, click on the white ball next to mask.
Scroll down in the properties tab. Now you can add your textures in the material section.
Try not to choose materials that have spaces in between.
For example,
Choose the first one instead of the second one for better visuals
Or if you're going for metal rust.
Go for the first one for better visuals.
Now add your textures in the properties window.
After adding your textures, it should look like this.
The End.