In this basic tutorial on Substance Painter, aimed at those who are truly starting from scratch with the program, we will look at the fundamental settings for creating a new Substance project and the characteristics a 3D file must have in order to be imported into a new Substance project.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this basic tutorial on Substance Painter, aimed at those who are truly starting from scratch with the program, we will look at the fundamental settings for creating a new Substance project and the characteristics a 3D file must have in order to be imported into a new Substance project, especially regarding UV unwrapping for Textures, as we will see. I should point out right away that this will be a fairly theoretical video tutorial, meaning that I will discuss a couple of very important topics, but I will not show any practical operations for creating Materials or anything else.
Let's start with the model format: Substance accepts various file formats for importing a 3D model into a project, but the formats I recommend you look for, if you are purchasing or downloading files from the web, or create, if you are exporting an object from a 3D modeling software such as Blender 3D, 3D Studio MAX, or others, are OBJ and FBX, since they are portable, universal formats that can be opened or written by most 3D modeling software working with meshes, meaning objects defined by vertices, edges, and faces. They also contain the definitions of the Materials and UV unwraps used to define the models.
I already discussed Materials, especially in PBR, in a previous video tutorial on Substance Painter, so we know that they are a set of information defining how the surface of an object reflects light.
In 3D modeling software, it is also possible to assign multiple sub-materials to an object, and this information is stored in exported FBX and OBJ files. We will soon see what this means with a practical example.
Let us also briefly introduce UV unwraps, which will become clearer shortly with the example we will see later in this tutorial: a UV map, also called a Layout or Unwrap, is the 2D representation of the surface of a 3D object. In practice, it consists of cutting open the geometry and laying it out on a flat plane.
Why is this important? Because in this way you can associate a point on this 2D image with the 3D surface, allowing you to draw logos or other graphic elements on the plane and have them correctly applied to the 3D object.
Note that Substance Painter will NOT import 3D models without UV unwraps, and it will clearly notify you of the problem with a message in the LOG tab, which you can enable from Window - Views - Log.
So let us finally see how to create a new Substance project, import an FBX file, and check the model's Materials and UV unwraps!
The first thing to do after launching Substance Painter 2019 is obviously to click File - New, shortcut CTRL + N.
In the "New Project" window that appears, you will find several fields, although not all of them need to be changed.
The first option, "Template", asks which preset to load.
Depending on the type of Workflow we want to follow in Substance, we can choose, for example, PBR Specular, PBR Metallic, Unity, or even use a custom Template we created ourselves, such as my own "METP-2019". Substance will then load some basic settings so that the tools needed for a specific purpose are ready to use.
In our case, we will choose PBR - Metallic Roughness (allegorithmic) to use the Metallic Workflow tools briefly described in a previous tutorial I published.
We must then choose the 3D model file to use, of course. Click the Select button and choose from disk a 3D model in one of the formats supported by Substance. In my case, I am selecting "american_football_ball.fbx".
At this point you can leave the other settings in the "New Project" tab at their default values. However, I should point out that the "Document Resolution" is not necessarily the resolution you will later use when exporting the created Textures. In fact, you can set a lower resolution here, such as 1024, which should be the default value, in order to work more smoothly while using fewer computing resources, and then choose a higher export resolution for the Materials later, such as 2048 or 4096 per side. So in this case we will leave it at 1024 and click OK to create the new project.
The very first thing to do now is to save the project. Substance Painter can occasionally crash, so it is a good idea to save immediately and remember to save periodically. Substance should also automatically generate Autosave files from time to time, which you will find in the project folder. They are extremely useful for recovering work, but they also take up quite a lot of disk space, so remember to delete them every now and then.
Let us take a look at the project.
In the 3D view window, you should see the object framed from the front in Material display mode, selectable from the drop-down menu in the top-right corner or with the shortcut M, standing for "Material".
To rotate the view around the object, press ALT and the left mouse button at the same time while moving the mouse.
To zoom in and out, use the mouse wheel or, if unavailable, hold ALT and the right mouse button while moving the mouse.
To pan the view, meaning translating the camera, hold ALT and the middle mouse button while moving the mouse.
In short, to change the viewpoint, use ALT together with the mouse buttons. You can also customize these and other shortcuts from Edit - Settings - Shortcuts, particularly "Camera rotate", "Camera translate", and "Camera zoom", especially if you do not have a three-button mouse.
By pressing F, shortcut for "Frame", you can center the object again in the viewport.
In the main program window you should see tabs such as Layers, Texture Set List, and others. You can add or remove tabs and toolbars through the Window menu. Afterward, you can arrange the tabs as you like by clicking and dragging their names within the interface, even docking multiple tabs into the same slot to save space.
Information about the Materials contained in the file and assigned to the object or scene objects can be found in Texture Set List. In fact, a "Texture Set" is a Material, and in this tab, as the name suggests, they are all listed.
In our case we only have one Material covering the entire surface. In future video tutorials I will show practical examples with multiple objects that may include one or more 3D objects or multiple sub-materials for the same object. For example, here I could have assigned two different sub-materials to the main body of the object and to the laces or strings, but I preferred using a single Material, so the different areas will be textured using masks that apply certain materials in some areas and different materials in others.
Let us now take a look at the model's UV unwrap by clicking the first icon in the group at the top-right of the 3D view. This allows you to display only the 3D view, only the 2D view, which shows the UV unwraps for the selected Texture Set, or both views side by side. I am selecting the last option, "3D|2D", shortcut F1.
To center the UV map within its window, press F, for "Frame" as mentioned earlier, while the mouse cursor is over that window.
Here you can clearly see the famous model "unwraps". We can identify the laces and the main body of the object.
Using an unwrap like this, where the different elements are grouped according to a certain logic, it becomes fairly easy to create masks that assign Textures and other effects only to specific parts of the object, even while using, as in this case, only one 3D object and one Material, or more precisely, one Texture Set.
One more small note regarding UV unwraps: they can exist with or without overlaps, meaning that some unwrap sections may overlap, and therefore the Textures and filters applied in those areas will appear on multiple parts of the object.
Most of the time you will want non-overlapping UV unwraps to avoid a cloned or tiled appearance on the object's surface. However, overlapping unwraps can be useful, for example, for the leaves of a tree. Instead of unwrapping and texturing each leaf individually, which would be almost impossible and also expensive in terms of hardware resources, you can create Textures for, say, four or five different leaves to introduce some visual variation, then reuse that mapping for all leaves by overlapping the unwraps onto those four or five variations, making all the leaves appear slightly different without spending too much time on texturing.
To summarize, when looking for a 3D model online or creating one yourself with the intention of texturing it in Substance Painter, keep an eye on these two factors:
the file format, preferably OBJ or FBX, since these are almost universal formats that also contain information about UV unwraps and the Materials and sub-materials assigned to the 3D object or objects in the file;
the UV unwraps, which must be present, otherwise Substance Painter will not open the file, and which, depending on your needs, should either be overlapping or non-overlapping.
All right, that is it for this tutorial! As always, feel free to leave doubts, questions, or requests in the video comments on YouTube. See you next time!