This week I focused on redirecting my attention to the surfacing look development for textures.
Reference Board Style Guide:
I reorganized the reference board and pulled out the most cohesive of the textures for various categories like background assets, hero props, man made environment materials, character texturing, and natural environment assets. I'm still trying to add a wider wealth of assets to reference but also at the same time making sure to weed out ones that don't quite fit as well.
Substance Designer Material:
I went back to the drawing board with Substance Designer and built a brush stroke material template. I used a tutorial online and followed the node setup to recreate a material that tiles brush strokes.
I then took the material from Substance Designer and brought it into Substance Painter and built a basic layer stack with non-destructive fill layers and mask generators that can be saved as a smart material that will apply to various baked geometries for props.
Substance Painter Prop Demo:
To demonstrate and test the tool and how it looks in practice, I used one of the brush props to texture since its nice and simple and super easy and quick to lay out the UVs as well as only has three separate materials on it.
Here's what the ZBrush high poly vs the Substance Painter viewports look like:
This is what a test render looked like in Arnold with the finished textures.
Prop Texturing Workflow Tutorial:
As requested by my group, I recorded this video tutorial going over every stage of texturing a prop.
Substance Designer tool explanation
Maya scene setup
UVs / Low poly export
ZBrush import,
Sculpting high poly detail
Setting up the Painter file
Baking the low poly mesh with the high poly normals
Exporting Substance Textures
Hypershade setup
Arnold render testing
Publishing assets
I broke the tutorial up into chapters so that people can jump straight to the part of the tutorial that they need in case they just need to brush up on something small like how to plug in the images in Hypershade or how to bake a mesh in Substance. I tried to be as in depth as possible and review every important button push from program to program in case anyone has forgotten anything.
Hopefully my group finds both the material and the tutorial useful. I've already seen how some of the props are turning out with just the very first published iteration of the smart material and I feel really excited and confident that our texturing workflow will be much more organized and assets will look a lot more cohesive visually.
Props textured by Aaron with the smart material:
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