This is a basic introductory tutorial intended for users who already know something about materials, brushes, and layer masks in Substance Painter, but have never used Particles in Substance Painter.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone! This is a basic introductory tutorial intended for users who already know something about materials, brushes, and layer masks in Substance Painter, but have never used Particles in Substance Painter.
Particles, or "particle brushes" in a sense, are special tools that allow you to paint strokes on objects and create patterns that, as you will see, have a life of their own. Starting from the brush stroke created with a mouse click, additional brush strokes are generated automatically, following the particle's algorithm. For this reason, these tools are also referred to as procedural, because they follow a set of rules and can be modified through parameters.
The particle's algorithm determines, for example, how many brush strokes should be generated from the main particle, often recursively, meaning that child strokes can generate additional strokes of their own, as well as their degree of spread, their maximum length, and so on.
The most interesting aspect of these algorithm parameters is that they can be extensively customized in the Brush tab, allowing us to start from a predefined setting, or preset, and modify it to obtain a different effect that is better suited to our needs.
While I was talking, I played around a bit with some Particle brushes on screen to quickly show you how these tools can automatically generate very interesting effects that would be difficult to achieve with manual brush strokes using Substance's regular Brushes. Now, however, let me show you a practical example.
The scene I am using contains three objects, three toro, the traditional Japanese lanterns. Each object has its own base material, Concrete Plain Brushed, with Tri-Planar mapping and Scale set to 2.
The lanterns look a little too clean. I want to add some moss, for example around the base and along some of the edges, so I add a material, in my case Pitch Grass Painted, placing it above the Concrete Plain Brushed material in the Layers tab of one of the three objects.
The new material will completely cover the one underneath it, so we need to give it a layer mask to specify which areas it should affect. Before doing that, however, I want to modify it a little because the scale and colors are not suitable for the object. I change Scale to 5 or 7, darken the base color slightly, and most importantly, change the Paint Color to a light green. By default, the Height channel for this material is disabled. I can choose whether to enable it and adjust the intensity of the surface details by changing the Height Range parameter in the Technical Parameters section of the material.
The material for the moss effect is ready, but now we need to limit it to specific areas. To do that, let's add a black layer mask to the material so that we can define its areas of influence with a brush...
...but this time, instead of clicking on the Brushes section of the Shelf, we click on the Particles section.
The Particle brushes included with Substance Painter are not particularly numerous, but they have intuitive names and allow you to create a fairly wide range of effects. As mentioned earlier, each one also provides several parameters that allow you to customize it, at least to some extent.
At first glance, and by taking a look at the animated preview of each Particle brush in the Properties - Physical Paint panel, the brush that seems most suitable for our needs is Organic Spread because, as the name suggests, it generates secondary strokes starting from the point where you click, with a spread that should feel organic, just as we would expect from a natural element.
With a quick click anywhere on the object, we can immediately see the effect generated by the brush and use it as a starting point for some adjustments by modifying parameters in the Properties - Physical Paint panel. For example, we can:
Increase or decrease the number of child particles generated by the main stroke using Spawn Rate Factor, which can be thought of as the particle generation frequency.
Disturb the direction of the various child particles, making their paths more chaotic and turbulent, using Turbulence Power.
Make the child particles travel more or less across the surface of the object through a combination of Particle Life, which determines how long a particle will live, and Particle Speed, which determines how fast that particle will move and therefore how far it can travel during the time specified by Particle Life.
Note that both Particle Life and Particle Speed also include parameters with the Rand, or Random, suffix, which add a degree of randomness to the value specified by the main parameter.
With this information, we can begin painting particles using either single clicks or click-and-drag strokes on the material's layer mask. Of course, we can undo our actions at any time using the CTRL+Z shortcut.
In my case, I think the child particles should not move too far away from the main stroke, nor should they have an excessively turbulent spread, so I adjust the parameters I mentioned accordingly.
Instead, I make the main brush strokes larger by changing the brush Size parameter with the CTRL + mouse wheel shortcut, and I create broader strokes by clicking and dragging across the surface of the objects.
Before ending this tutorial, however, there are two important considerations. Since the particles, as we are using them here, are affecting a layer mask:
We can also edit that mask using other tools, such as standard brushes. For example, we can manually remove particles from certain areas of the model using a Basic Hard brush with Grayscale set to black.
We can also add generators, filters, or layers to the mask. For example, we can apply a Blur filter to soften it, with obvious consequences for the edges of the white areas in the mask and therefore for the boundaries of the material associated with it.
To these considerations we should add the fact that, of course, the Material settings can be modified at any time. Up to this point, we have been working on the mask that determines where the effect is applied, but the material itself is still there, and we can still modify its color, Roughness, mapping type, scale, rotation, and so on.
Well, that's it for this video tutorial! See you next time!