Learning Substance

This post contains three projects that I have been working on in an effort to learn more about the Substance Suit. The first project was using Substance Designer to generate some basic procedural textures including a rust material and a metal plat material. The second was to texture a lantern object using Substance Designer. The third and biggest project was texturing a sci-fi space suit.

Lantern Project

This was a fun project and comes from a tutorial series by Algorithmic. It was a great way to learn the basics of Substance Painter. You use a lot of the basic materials that come with Substance such as paint and rust. I really had a fun time using the basic to paint on and off different materials. There is something so satisfying about moving your brush and material with the depth and different specular properties just appearing.

Space Suit

I found this one on Udemy, which I often find very hit or miss. The author supplies you with the model and from there takes you through his process. My main take away from this tutorial series was that you should just apply a material and then using masking to determine where the material shows up. If you instead paint a material onto the model then it will be more difficult to adjust later.

Something I found interesting was the how the textures showed up differently in Maya with Arnold than in IRay which comes with Substance. I didn’t expect them to be exactly the same, but the height maps and specular really required some tweaking to work.

Substance Designer Materials

This is the first project I completed with Substance. It was another tutorial series from Algorithmic themselves. I created a couple of different basic materials with parametric properties. I found it really similar to working in Nuke since they both use a node structure. I found myself using a lot of noise textures which once again is similar to how I work in Nuke.