Applying Photo Textures- Substance Painter

After spending the summer away from my computer for the most part, I really appreciated the opportunity to refresh my skills on Substance Painter and the introduction some new skills; adding photo textures and gradients to a mesh using masks. I also found that this was a good opportunity to explore some more of the tools on Photoshop (filtering, offset, creating textures from photos and modifying images), as it is not necessarily a program that I’m used to working with, but I can say that after this exercise, I feel more confident in my ability to navigate it. I feel like the new skills I’ve learned here will be instrumental in helping with my 3D Environment project, particularly in terms of using Photoshop textures- I’m curious to see how I can use filtering and layer masks to create a more interesting style to apply to my assets.

Before texturing the mesh that I chose, I gathered some references to help guide me in terms of the style I wanted to convey, and what things I could do to communicate that style;

The shape of the tree I had chosen did remind me of a Seussian object; something not quite so realistic, and it had an unusual appearance with possibly some artificiality to it. It’s shape also reminded me of the lamps that used to fascinate me as a young child when I went to my aunt’s house, so I wanted to incorporate a stained-glass inspired appearance into the texture, which I thought would work well with the Seussian artificiality.

Here is the textured model in Substance Painter. As you may be able to see, I added a slight gradient on the areas of foliage so that the tops and bottoms of those elements would appear more saturated. I also tweaked the settings for the baked lighting and the metal and roughness settings to give the model the artificial look I was going for.

Above is the final render presented on Sketchfab. I enjoyed experimenting with the lighting settings in terms of the environment orientation and the lighting colour. I think the darker background with subtle navy hues really complemented the orange tint from the reflected light, which I think achieved the feel of mystery and obscurity I was aiming for, as well as being reminiscent of the orange tinted light one might see from a streetlamp at night. I used a basic foliage image in Photoshop for the texture, to which I then applied the ‘stained-glass’ filter, and I was really happy with how that depicted the feel of the stained glass lamps I had been looking at. To the trunk, I also applied a gradient which I then scaled down and rotated to create rippled lines along the bark in order to mimic the Seussian artifice I wanted to achieve. Overall, I would describe the mood I wanted to convey here was other-worldly, but not in the sci-fi or extra-terrestrial sense, simply in the sense that something is not quite right and has an air of peculiarity.

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