3D Creative December 2015

3DCREATIVE MAGAZINE | Texturing assets with Substance Painter
Varying the wood color: The wooden
09 parts of the shield are looking a bit too
samey, so to fix this I use Photoshop to edit the
base wood texture we originally brought in as
our starting layer. I make the texture lighter in
color. Back in Substance Painter, I import the
new texture and apply it as a new fill layer to my
stack. I then apply a black mask layer to make
it invisible. I can now use a white noisy brush to
gently draw in some highlights to the wood. As
this is a fairly noisy surface you would expect a lot
of variations in color and dirt.
Hand-painted dirt: Now all of our
10 Smart Materials are placed, we need
to start to bed them in more so they look more
natural. We do this by painting in details such as
weathering and dirt. So on a new empty layer, I
use a black noisy brush and lightly paint in dirt
build-up behind the nails and in the creases.
Don’t be scared to add too much, because if it
looks too heavy when we are done we can always
reduce the opacity of the layer or use a mask layer
to soften the effect.
Painting dirt build-up: On a new layer
11 I continue to build up the layers of dirt,
painting in all of the corners and crevices. I keep
certain areas more clean, for example where
the shoulders or forearm would be continually
rubbing the surface. I like to keep each element’s
painted dirt on separate layers, so I can use the
layers’ opacity to tone the effect down if it’s too
heavy without affecting the whole shield.
Coloring the dirt: Doing the same
12 process as above, I paint some dirt
detail on the metal hand guard areas, particularly
around the nails. As this is a metal surface, I can
add some color to the dirt layer to represent
rusting. I keep the color dull so it doesn’t stand
out too much from the rest of the shield. I also
add some larger patches of rust color on the
spherical surface just to vary the diffuse coloring.
Stitching mask: I feel it would be an
13 easier process to paint the stitching in
Photoshop rather than in Substance Painter,
where I’ll have more control over such a finicky
process. Using the UV texture and the normal
map texture as a guide, I use the normal map
texture to show where the height data is for each
stitch so the textures line up correctly. I paint a
black-and-white mask of stitching, making sure
the stitches are untidy to look more natural. I save
the texture out.
Imported layer mask: Import the newly
14 created mask texture into Substance
Painter and select it in the Textures tab of the
Using a second pre-made texture to add variations to the wood texture
Hand-painted dirt and grime to really weather and age this asset
Continual build-up of painted dirt layers on the wooden panels
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