When I first tried to bake my meshes in substance I encountered some issues. Odd white bands encircled the hat and hat band remaining even with textures applied, and faces seemed to be protruding from one side of the scarf. I’d also accidentally applied a single texture to everything before exporting it, but I was able to realise where I went wrong there.
Thankfully Henry knew the former was probably because the hat was being baked with the low poly mesh when it had no equivalent in the high poly sculpt. Some quick edits and re-baking in the baking menu made this a pretty quick fix.
The scarf issue was a bit tricky to figure out initially, but in checking the retop in Maya I found that when I had conformed the mesh, since there weren’t any faces on the back of the low poly mesh, certain faces had attempted to wrap around and conform to the back of the sculpt. I was able to delete the problematic faces without losing anything.
Now I could start texturing! It’s very exciting to see how well I could translate the idea in my head and on paper to my character in Substance.
It was important to me that the top hat and scarf looked like silk. Silk top hats actually stopped being made in the 1960s, but until then it was the more proper and traditional (and better-looking) material for that kind of hat to be made with. Since then period dramas and white tie and morning dress* enthusiasts alike have had to deal with either expensive antiques or quite literally lacklustre felt alternatives. As such, to make my character feel more proper and period-appropriate I wanted very much to find a suitable silk material for his hat and scarf, and as it happens I found a few on searching for ‘silk’ in Adobe’s community assets website.
*see below examples of Morning Dress (top two images) and of silk top hats (below two)
I tried all of the above and liked the effect of the smart material on the far left most of all for the hat. I struggled with the scarf and kept changing my mind on what looked nicest between the white fur and grey coat, but as a last resort I tried the Chevron material above after discounting it entirely because of the pattern and really liked it when I’d changed the colours.
You’ll notice textures for the hat band, fur, face and coat in the above image. I’ll get onto them momentarily.
Now since the hat band is the only element with notable colour, it went through several incarnations. I’d had a thought that red might be a nice accent colour to all the white and black, but it was giving too much the impression of old newsprint when I tried it out. I thought blue silk could be nice but I still wasn’t responding to it. At one point I was quite decided on green silk in reference to the green collars my dogs wear now and have worn in the past, and I think it was here I understood that it was the silk I disliked, not just the colour.
I had textured the coat and trousers early on with a material called ‘fabric suit vintage’ and stayed with it because it created some visual interest beyond a pure grey or black block with its interesting woollen weave and allowance for under and overtones, and this is what I ended up texturing the hat band with.
I altered the height, rotation and scale settings to make the seam in the UVs less visible and used a purple and green which I found quite pleasing. I matched the pattern on the scarf to this with a teal colour to add some coordination and cohesion to his outfit.
The fur was a simpler process than the hat band, though like it it went through some alterations. I stuck with this synthetic fur texture I’d found in the community asset library but for a while I was uncomfortable with how white it had to be to look as it should. It was clashing with the off white colour of the scarf and I just wasn’t finding it very interesting to look at, in contrast to the fur on the sculpt.
However when I opened the settings for this texture I was intrigued to see the option for multiple colours to be used. I attempted some natural fur-like colours to see how the effect would work and to my delight it looked pretty good!
On the features I used a black leather material for the nose which I liked and thought accurate enough, and for a time I had matte black eyes but found them odd-looking and changed them to a ‘rubber tire’ texture with a reddish brown colour (also to add some warmth to compliment all the cool green and blue accents). I shifted the hue of the nose towards a deep red for the same reason.
I imported a paper texture and used it to give a rough look of a rolled cigarette, and with that I was finished texturing and exported my textures ready for posing and uploading to sketchfab.
