Materials sometimes come as packed maps, like the ones we get from Quixel for Unreal Engine. If we wanted to make a change to those textures in Substance Painter, we can use the Grayscale Conversion generator to setup the material. Here’s how to do that. Let’s assume we have an ORM map. This means that …
Last week I wanted to add a table cloth to a table and add a lace trim, so that it would match an existing item of furniture in our scene. I went through several iterations until I came up with a good workflow, and thought I’d share it with you. This took much longer on …
I’m sure we’ve all been there: we want to adjust a property on our Substance material and realise, with some perplexion perhaps, that said channel doesn’t exist. Take this example in which we’re missing the opacity and the emission properties. What if my object needed one of those? How do we bring them in? This …
I had this really flat object whose texture looked OK, but it didn’t have a normal or displacement map. I wanted the object to look a little more interesting, so I applied the base texture as a height map, and that worked well. The question was, how do I export this so that the details …
The other day I imported Normal Maps from Marvelous Designer into Substance Painter. Turns out they were flipped, or at least parts of them were. I was trying to find a way to invert them, which I knew had to exist, but it wasn’t very intuitive to find. Thanks to Fugazi (aka John from 3D …
Sometimes we may need access to occluded parts in Substance Painter. The easiest way to deal with such hidden parts is by making them accessible before importing the model, such as opening the lid of a chest or the mouth of a figure, or even “exploding” an object to make all its surfaces accessible. While …
This week I’ve been playing with the fascinating Warp Projection tools in Substance Painter. This way we can project an image onto a 3D object and add vertices onto the projection grid, with which minute details can be lined up for a perfect fit. I’ve tried it with one of those pre-made head textures and …
I’ve just figured out how to do Projection Painting in Substance Painter, and thought I’d best make a note of it. The magic happens inside a regular Paint Layer. It works in both paint mode and projection mode, but to transfer colour information, we’ll need to switch into Projection Mode. With your paint layer selected, …
I really like Substance Painter and the way we can texture and get creative with materials. Although it’s not an easy app to learn, it brings a lot of value to 3D models, both new and old. What’s not well handled is material zones on export. If a mesh has 5 zones, we get a …
I was wondering if I could use Blender to make my Substance Painter selections a little easier. I wanted to avoid importing the material zones into Substance, while retaining this information at the same time. Turns out there is a way to do this, but it needs a little manual labour. Josh explains it in …