During class we spent our time looking at Substance Painter to learn how to texture our models, and looked at some tutorials Alec put up for learning to use Substance Painter. Using what we learned from the tutorials, we were tasked with colouring the default model and showing the final result to Alec a while later. Mine is shown below:

I didn’t quite get to finish colouring mine in before we showed them to Alec which is why there’s still some noticeable gaps without any colour, but I’m quite proud of how mine turned out in the end since I started getting used to the software and used the fact that mine was looking like an unorganised mess at the start to my advantage as now it looks like it was covered in different paint splatters so the mess ended up looking intentional for the most part, and now I really love how mine looks overall. I only really got to explore the colour, metalness and using the heart stencil since I was wary about experimenting further as it was my first time using the software and didn’t want to ruin what I had so far, but when it comes to doing my modelling assignment I’ll make sure to utilise what I can from Substance Painter.

As well as colouring and texturing the models in Substance Painter, we also learned how to bake maps in Substance Painter and using the smart materials to colour and texture them instead of doing it manually. We downloaded the Hard Surface Model and opened the FBX file in Substance Painter before we added the smart materials to it, as well as using different smart materials for different objects in the model by using masks, as well as exporting the texture maps from Substance Painter and put them in the Maya source images folder to add them to the models in Maya. My Hard Surface Model is shown below:

For the 30 minute feedback session with Michael on Monday, I was working on texturing the coins using Substance Painter so I would have more things to show him by the time Monday came around. Before this, I had redone the UV mapping for the coins using one of the videos from last week’s post and they look a lot better now, and I exported the coins as an FBX file and opened them in Substance Painter. The first thing I did was selecting a gold colour to use for the gold coin and the gold and silver coin and gave them 1 metalness each for that colour before doing the same with the silver colour for the silver coin and the top and bottom of the gold and silver coin and finally finishing with a copper colour for the bronze coin.

Since I couldn’t remember at the time how to view the models as only their base colour and without a light source, I was using each colour once so I wouldn’t have 2 different gold hues for the gold coin and the gold and silver coin since I wanted to make them consistent colour-wise. Unfortunately one face of the gold and silver coin didn’t have enough gold in it meaning that when I went to put in the silver part of the face there was now a gap without any colour in it at all, meaning I had to try and get the gold colour back and finish colouring that part in so every part of the coin model is coloured in.

Thankfully I soon realised that you can change the view from material to base colour so I was able to get the exact colours back and was able to cover all parts of each model. The next thing I did was to get a slightly darker hue of each colour which I could use to create the markings on the coins using the stencil and used the height to make them appear 3D. The stencil I used was one with crossed bones with dots and I thought it was an appropriate fit for the treasure chest, as if the treasure was originally hidden away by pirates and is now guarded by a dragon. My textured coins are shown below:

I believe I textured the coins quite well in Substance Painter when I eventually got the hang of it and I think the coins turned out quite well. Once I exported them to the source images folder in Maya and applied them to my coin models, I had an error where instead of the base colour being assigned to just the coins, it was assigned to every model including the treasure chest and lid which I didn’t want. I wasn’t sure if it was because I hadn’t UV mapped the chest and lid yet so the base colour was assigned to everything, or if it had something to do with lambert1 which is what I was trying to add the base colour texture to. I ended up taking a screenshot of the problem which I could show Michael during our meeting in a couple days and spent the rest of my weekend before the meeting working on a storyboard for the Animated Narratives module. My error screenshot is shown below:

During the feedback meeting I asked him about my texturing problem with the coins in that it would apply the texture to everything not just the coins, and he said to go into the hypershade and create a new lambert with the base colour texture and apply that lambert to the coins as the lambert has only been applied to the coins and not everything as everything has the lambert1 lambert which is why when the base colour texture got applied to lambert1 it went to everything. With regards to the more complicated Substance Painter maps like metal, roughness, normal and height, he advised to use an Arnold shader rather than the simple lambert as lamberts don’t have options to add those maps and recommended I use the Arnold standard shader which has things like metalness and can be used for the maps created in Substance Painter.

To close off, he said my chest looks quite basic and that I should add more detail to it like the reference image I showed him, and I told him I am planning on adding more detail to it once I got my texturing issue solved and that I was also planning on adding a dragon curling around it using a cylinder for the body and cube for the head. One tip he gave me for adding more detail to create specific shapes was to add a 2D plane and use the knife tool to cut the shape you want into it, and clean up any faces that no longer have 4 sides in the new shape before extruding it to create your final shape, such as a lock for the chest.

Taking this advice in mind, I’ll start working on adding more detail to the chest and lid to make it look less basic and more unique and possibly get started on the dragon model too. With regards to the dragon idea, Michael said that even a basic dragon will incorporate more modelling techniques than what I used with the chest and lid, but I’m hoping I have enough time and knowledge to be able to pull it off as it would make a difference to an otherwise standard chest to make the scene look more unique.

References Of The Week