For week 5’s task, we had to model a helmet of our choosing from scratch, like last week, but texture it in Substance Painter this time. Once again pulling from Sonic and the Black Knight, I chose Sir Galahad’s helmet as my subject, since I didn’t want to overcomplicate the geometry for myself like with the sword, and I found the shape simple yet interesting. Getting reference images was harder since this was a more obscure subject, so I had to use multiple images and interpret the exact shape and proportions myself. Since this subject is symmetrical, has less complicated and overlapping shapes, and less colours, it was a much smoother process.
UV unwrapping was a lot simpler because of this, too. I encountered significantly less issues.
Substance Painter was a lot less overwhelming than I expected. I found all of the tools intuitive and managed to figure it out with minimal help. I had a lot of fun figuring out how the layers and smart maps worked in particular. I spent a long time fine tuning my materials to make sure they were perfect.
Once I was satisfied, I brought the map files into blender and used nodes to apply them to a singular texture. I had to make a few minor adjustments to hue and values, but was eventually happy with the result.
That is, until my textures were disappearing in the renders. I spent hours going through every camera setting imaginable trying to figure out what I had done, downloaded node wrangler, looked up forums for every possible problem it could be, and almost gave up out of frustration, until I realised that my backup model (a collection of all the separate objects of my helmet before I joined them) was still toggled to appear in renders and was covering the actual finished model. I panicked over nothing.
With that sorted, I set up the lighting for my render. I’m very happy with how the model and Substance Painter textures came out, but I felt like the materials didn’t look as nice as they did in Substance Painter. I wasn’t sure if that was an issue on my side of lighting the scene or if it was just a difference between the programs.
Overall, I had a very positive experience and enjoyed using Substance Painter a lot.
Finished product!