This week we built on our ability to add texture to a model by using Substance Painter 3D.
Importing the given model into Substance Painter I went and applied different materials to sections in layers, I wanted to have many different textures so I used concrete, leather, wood, brass and Iron. I also changed some of the roughness and metallic values to get my desired effect of some contrast between them.
Then I wanted to add some bumpy texture to my stone, and I achieved this by adding some height. I created a fill layer above the stone texture and copied the mask from my concrete to this fill layer, turned off all channels except for height, added a rocky black and white texture to the height map and I added a fill layer to this mask. Then to make sure the bumpy texture only stayed on the stone I added the height layer and the concrete texture layer to a group and copied the initial mask to the group. Finally, I adjusted the greyscale on my mask’s fill layer to my liking.
With this done I went and baked my mesh map so I could begin to use some smart masks. The first thing I applied was Ambient Occlusion, and this black and white map came from baking my mesh. I made a new fill layer, above all my other layers, and added my ambient occlusion to this, adjusting the blend mode (first I used multiply but decided the soft light gave me nicer shadows), this came out too exposed, so I adjusted this by adding a levels mask on the layer.
Multiply Blend Mode
Soft Light Blend Mode
Then I added some dirt, creating a new fill layer and dragging the dirt smart mask on top. Then simply adjusting the colour, roughness and height on the fill layer as well as the different levels on the smart mask to change the amount of dirt.
Initial Dirt Mask
Final Dirt Mask
Next, I wanted to add some blood. For this I added a new fill layer, added a black mask and a fill layer on the black mask. Then I added a gradient texture to the greyscale, I changed this to a spherical projection and adjusted the balance for how much blood I wanted (I also changed the repeating of this to none). I then added this to a group and applied a black mask and selected just the area where I wanted my blood to show through. I duplicated this group to apply blood to my knife on top, except I changed the spherical projection to planar as it looked better for this area.
The last thing I did in Substance Painter was applying a ‘logo’ to my hammer and keeping with the Warhammer design I searched for one of the insignias on google and saved this and just dragged this into the materials. I created a new fill layer, added a black mask and then a paint layer to the mask before dragging my image to the stencil area and adjusted the stencil to fit before painting over (when I did this, I didn’t cover the whole area as I wanted this spray paint like look), doing this on both sides.
The last thing to do was putting these image textures into Blender. I exported these image textures and went back into Blender and opened the shader editor, importing the base colour, roughness, metallic and normal map images as image texture nodes. Then connected these together and used a Hue/Saturation node and a Contrast node to adjust some of my maps.
Once I was happy with how my hammer looked, I changed the HDRI map to the sunset and added a quick background before rendering using cycles, and I am very happy with how this turned out and how to use Substance Painter for 3D models.