In this short basic tutorial for Substance Painter 2019, we will see how to change the background image of the virtual environment, while also observing how different images affect the material preview, and how to change the lighting direction generated by those images inside the scene. Among other things, we will also see how to import a Texture, and in general an external resource, into a project, with the possibility of turning it into a standard resource in our Shelf, meaning available in other Substance sessions as well.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this short basic tutorial for Substance Painter 2019, we will see how to change the background image of the virtual environment, while also observing how different images affect the material preview, and how to change the lighting direction generated by those images inside the scene. Among other things, we will also see how to import a Texture, and in general an external resource, into a project, with the possibility of turning it into a standard resource in our Shelf, meaning available in other Substance sessions as well.
In this tutorial, I will use a 3D model to which I will apply a metallic material; the reason for this will become clear in just a moment.
I created a new Substance project by setting the “PBR – Metallic Roughness (allegorithmic)” Template and loading into the project the model I chose to use, leaving all the other settings at their default values.
The model is actually made up of two objects, each with its own Material, as we can see by looking at the Texture Set List, where we find “base” and “moving_part”.
First of all, in both Materials I remove the default Layer by selecting it and clicking the trash can icon in “Layers”, then I add a Fill Layer for the “base” material by clicking the “Add a Fill Layer” icon.
I set the Fill Layer this way in its Properties – Fill tab: pure white color, Roughness set to 0, and Metallic set to 1.0.
This is therefore a completely reflective Material, a perfect mirror, as we can see by examining it in Material mode in the 3D view; obviously, I decided to use this kind of material because it allows us to better appreciate the effects of the virtual environment background image.
With this Fill Layer selected in Layers, I press CTRL+C to copy it, then I select the “moving_part” Texture Set and, with the mouse over “Layers”, I press CTRL+V to paste the same Layer into this material as well.
As we have seen, the object reflects the background image... but what exactly is this image? How can we change it, how can we modify its orientation to see different shading effects on the object's surfaces, and how can we display it in the background of the 3D view?
The answers to these questions can be found in the Display Settings tab, which you can activate, if it is not already visible, from the menu Window – Views – Display Settings.
First of all, let us increase the value of the “Environment Opacity” parameter so that we can display the background image.
Notice that the image will appear blurred: this is a default setting in Substance Painter, applied to prevent the image from distracting us too much from the object we are texturing; you can make the background more or less blurred by adjusting the “Environment Blur” parameter.
To change the orientation of the background image while keeping the object still, so that you can evaluate different lighting effects on a specific point of the surface, you can modify the “Environment Rotation” parameter. However, I strongly recommend learning Substance's default shortcut instead: SHIFT + right mouse click and drag, with the mouse inside the 3D view of course, so that you can rotate the background on the fly while working without having to open the Display Settings tab for this purpose.
We can change the background image used as the scene's lighting source by clicking the button next to “Environment Map”.
Substance Painter provides several HDR images, both in HDR and EXR formats, meaning high dynamic range images.
My advice is to use a “neutral” image, meaning one with good brightness and not too heavily shifted toward a specific color or tone, so that you do not light your models for a very specific environment, but in a more generic way.
As an example, when I want to use an image with various color shades, I usually use “Glazed Patio”, which is included with Substance, but I do NOT display it in the virtual background, meaning I set Environment Opacity to 0.0, so that I can focus on the object without possible distractions.
When I want to use a colorless image that simulates photographic studio lighting, I use an HDR image that I created myself. Let us now see how to load a custom background image into a Substance project and, more generally, how to load external resources such as Textures, Alpha opacity maps, and more.
Open the File menu and click “Import resources”.
In the window that appears, click the “Add Resources” button, then choose from disk the file, or files in case of multiple selection, that you want to import; in my case, it is the HDR file that I want to use.
The file will appear in the “Import Resources” window and notice that next to it there is a box labeled “undefined”. Click that box and choose from the menu that appears the option that best identifies the resource you want to import: “environment”, not “texture”, because the resource must be used as the environment lighting texture, not applied to a Material.
Now click the menu next to “Import your resources to:” at the bottom of the window to choose how to import the resource, meaning:
only for the current session, so you will NOT find it again in the program later, not even if you save the project;
only for the current project, which of course you must save to disk. In this way, the resource will be embedded inside the project file, which will therefore become larger, but at least you will be able to recover the resource in the future as well;
permanently in the program Shelf: Substance will therefore make a copy of the resource in its working folder and make it available for future launches of the program, independently of the current project.
In general, I do not recommend using the first option, “current session”: it is better to save the resources at least with the project for future use.
The “project” option is intuitively suitable for project-specific resources, such as a particular mask or Texture, while it is not suitable for generic resources that we might routinely use in multiple projects. For those, it makes more sense to use the “shelf” option instead.
For this specific case, let us choose “shelf” so that we can find this resource again in any future launch of Substance regardless of the project, since it is not a project-specific resource, such as a logo or a particular opacity mask for an object, but a generic resource that we intend to use on multiple occasions.
Finally, import the resource by clicking Import.
Depending on the type of resource specified in “Import resources”, Substance will place the item inside a dedicated folder in the Shelf window... and in fact we can find our HDR image among the others in Environments.
To use the image as the scene background, click “Environment Map” in “Display Settings” and choose the image from the list.
Well, that is all for this short but, hopefully, useful tutorial! As always, feel free to leave doubts, questions, or requests in the comments on YouTube. See you next time!
