In this tutorial, created with Substance Painter 2019, we will see how to use a Generator to modify the edges of an object. Specifically, we will focus on the Metal Edge Wear Generator and the Invert and Blur filters.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! In this tutorial, created with Substance Painter 2019, we will see how to use a Generator to modify the edges of an object. Specifically, we will focus on the Metal Edge Wear Generator and the Invert and Blur filters.
I discussed Generators in Substance Painter in a previous video tutorial, the one about the blotchy material, where I used Dripping Rust on a 3D cigar model. In that tutorial, I explained what Generators are and why it is necessary to bake the geometry maps, which is something we will also do in this tutorial. For that reason, I recommend watching that tutorial before studying this one.
Okay, let's examine the project. We have the 3D model of a stylized little bridge, meaning that the geometry is not particularly complex. We want to apply a wood Material, but we also want to introduce some differences between the edges and the central areas of the various wooden planks, for example by desaturating the central areas and emphasizing the wood relief and distortion along the edges.
First, I will assign a basic wood material to the object. For this example, I am choosing "Paldao Wood". In this case, the Height relief is too strong, so I am reducing the Height Range intensity in Properties Fill Parameters, setting it for example to 0.08. I am also increasing the material tiling on the object, which has good UV unwrapping so there is no need to adjust the mapping, by setting Scale to 3.
I will desaturate the wood color a little. In Properties Fill Parameters, click "Wood Color" and lower the value of the S parameter, which stands for Saturation, bringing it from the default value of 0.62 to, for example, 0.35. This material works well for the inner areas of the wooden pieces. Let's rename it "inner" to avoid confusion.
Let's duplicate this material, place the copy above the original, and rename it "outer" in the Layers panel.
We can immediately notice that duplicating the Material has increased the Height relief across the entire surface of the object. We will come back to this point later.
To limit the effect of outer to the edges of the object, we need a mask. Let's add a black mask to this material, effectively disabling it completely.
To create the mask for the edges, right-click the mask, making sure you click the mask and not the material, then choose "Add Generator". As the generator, select "Metal Edge Wear". The word "edge" refers precisely to the object's edges.
The result is disappointing, and from the Dripping Rust Generator tutorial we already know why. Click Bake Mesh Maps in the Texture Set Settings panel and perform a basic bake of the maps required by the Generator.
Keep in mind that outer has the same color as inner, so let's modify it by restoring the saturation value of outer to 0.62. Also, increase the Height Range value to emphasize the relief details. Here I am exaggerating a bit and setting it to 0.15.
Once these operations are complete, the new result will look very different from the previous one, and we can appreciate it better by disabling the visibility of the inner material.
Not bad as a starting point, but there are at least two improvements we can make, and I invite you to suggest others in the video comments. For example, we can soften the mask a little to make the transition between the inner and outer materials less abrupt. We can also completely exclude the inner material, which is currently applied to the entire surface of the object, from the edges.
Let's start by softening the edges of the outer material mask. Select the Metal Edge Wear Generator inside the mask, right-click it, and choose "Add Filter".
A filter is generally a tool that modifies the information to which it is applied. In this case, that information is the mask produced by the underlying element, namely the Metal Edge Wear Generator.
The filter is currently empty. In Properties Filter, choose the effect we need, which is Blur.
The effect will immediately be visible in the Material preview. We can adjust its intensity using the "Blur Intensity" parameter in Properties Filter.
The other modification we want concerns excluding the inner Material from the edges, which should belong to outer. What we want is essentially a mask for inner that is an inverted version of the mask used for outer. You probably already see where this is going: we need an Invert filter, and, as luck would have it, Substance Painter includes one.
First, let's assign the same mask used by outer to inner. Right-click the mask of outer and choose "Copy Mask". Then right-click inner, which still has no mask, and choose "Add black mask" to create an empty black mask.
To copy the outer mask together with its Filter and Generator, right-click the black mask of inner and choose "Paste into mask". To better see what is happening, temporarily disable the visibility of the outer material in Layers.
Okay, you may have noticed an "Invert Mask" command when right-clicking. It is true that it achieves a result similar to the one I want to create with filters, but it uses a different tool, namely "Levels", which I will discuss in more detail another time. For this tutorial, let's focus only on Generators and Filters.
Right-click the Metal Edge Wear Generator of inner and choose "Add Filter".
The new empty filter will be placed exactly between the Generator and the Blur filter.
In the Properties Filter panel, choose "Invert". In this way, the Generator will create a mask for the edges, just as it does for outer, then it will invert it, and finally it will apply Blur to soften it. We can also adjust the Blur Intensity value as desired, independently from the filter used by the outer Material. At this point, we can also re-enable the visibility of outer.
To summarize, in this tutorial we have seen how to use the Metal Edge Wear Generator to quickly isolate the edges of an object. We then simulated some material wear, in this case by changing the color saturation and increasing the relief intensity through Height, using two slightly different versions of the same Material. Finally, we applied Blur and Invert filters to the masks created by the Generators in order to modify them.
That's all for this tutorial. See you next time!