In this tutorial, created with the 2019 version of Substance Painter, I will show you how I used a Generator to add light-colored blotches to the Texture of a Material.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this tutorial, created with the 2019 version of Substance Painter, I will show you how I used a Generator to add light-colored blotches to the Texture of a Material.
As an example, I am using the 3D model of a cigar. As you can see, there is currently no material assigned to the outer surface.
First, I add a Cardboard material by dragging it from the Materials tab in the Shelf to the top of the Layers tab. Since I want to use multiple materials on this surface, I do not create a mask for the material. Instead, I create a Group from the material by right-clicking Cardboard and choosing Group Layer(s).
I then create the mask for the material by right-clicking the new group and selecting “Add Black Mask”.
To assign the group to the object's surface, I select the mask, switch to “Polygon Fill” mode with the “UV Chunk Fill” type in the Properties tab, using pure white as the color, then click on the outer surface of the object.
I change the Texture size on the surface. I select the Cardboard material and, in the “Properties - Fill” tab, set the Scale value to 2 and change the color to RGB 0.3, 0.18, 0.09.
To add lighter-colored blotches, I proceed as follows: I duplicate the material I just created by selecting it and pressing CTRL+C and CTRL+V, a simple copy and paste operation that places the duplicate above the original Cardboard material inside the group.
I change the color of this material to RGB 0.4, 0.24, 0.12 to make it lighter.
It is now time to create the mask that will apply the material in blotches by using a Generator, a Substance Painter tool that, as the name suggests, generates data based on certain characteristics of the object's geometry.
First, we create a black mask for the top Cardboard material.
To add a Generator to the mask, select the mask itself, not the Cardboard material, in Layers. Then right-click and choose “Add Generator” from the menu that appears.
Set the Generator to Dripping Rust in the Properties tab. However, notice that the Generator relies on several “Image Inputs” (Curvature, Ambient Occlusion, and Position), which are currently missing, so the result is not very interesting.
To quickly generate these maps, go to the Texture Set Settings tab and click the “Bake Mesh Maps” button. Then click “Bake [object name] Mesh Maps” in the panel that appears, leaving the default settings unchanged, as they will work perfectly well for this project.
As you can see, Substance Painter has created several maps for us, including the ones required by the Generator, which will recognize them automatically. The result is much more interesting than before because the mask generated by Dripping Rust, visible in the preview in Layers, is based on the object's geometry.
In theory, the tutorial is now complete, but before wrapping up I would also like to show you how I added some surface relief to the object's Height map. In the Materials tab, search for “Paper Diagonal Displacement” and drag it into the materials group, placing it at the bottom of the group.
Change the Scale value to 3, then disable all channels except Height, since the surface relief is the only effect from the Material that I want to use.
To adjust the intensity of the effect, modify the “Height Range” value of the Material in the “Basic Parameters” section of the “Properties - Fill” tab. The effect becomes much more visible when the scene lighting is properly oriented, which I change using SHIFT + right mouse click.
That's it for this tutorial! See you next time!