ANSWERED: Custom decals and painting

Falkrum

Hello folks. Please, help me to find out how to use custom decals, bitmaps in local places and actual painting in Quixel Suit. I cant find info about that process...

Micky Pain

The quick and easy way I use if I want to add a decal (say a flag decal on a painted metal surface):

* Create my base material or smart material
* Create empty layer in my albedo map where I want my decal to go (i.e above the paint but below the dirt)
* Paint my decal or paste in a photo source
* Mask out the area I don't want to show or use blend mode to superimpose my decal
* Force refresh the previewer to see the changes

Off course, you can go more fancy that that:
Break the decal into material IDs by color and create one material for each (easy of you only have a handful of colors, impossible if it has gradients etc)

Create a material and mask out only the decal (if you want a plastic sticker on a metal surface for example)

If you get more fancy, you may want to add custom normals (thickness etc) and gloss/spec for your decals as well, so the masked material would work well for that.

And painting in Quixel works just the same, make a layer and start painting on it, then force-refresh the preview.

Somewhere I read they are working on a paint-mode for the previewer, but that's a long-time "coming soon"...

Anyway, that's about the way I do my custom details when I need it, like adding local pattern to a cloth piece or added printed detail and markings.

The same way also works for masks, BTW:
Open the dynamask editor, make a new layer on top and start creating your custom masks (localized blood spatter, tears, holes, anything that's impossible to mask procedurally) and press done in the editor without changing anything.

But be careful with that because if you open the dynmask editor again after that, it will erase all your manual detail and leave you with the procedural mask again.

So if you do manual masks, you should save it in a separate file to keep it (it's in the channels tab).

That manual mask work is also great for fixing seams in external 3d painting programs:

copy mask from channels
save to new file
load in bodypaint or whatever
fix seams add details etc
save
copy tweaked masked back over mask in channels
In Quixel, select copy mask to all maps
Profit

Enjoy,

-M

Eric Ramberg

I think I want Micky Pain to take over my job! That was certainly an exhaustive answer, thanks!

Falkrum

Micky Pain
Thanks a lot! A detailed answer that I needed to understand the situation.
Eric Ramberg
I hope in the future there will be more friendly way of working with decals, to easily work with additional maps like normal, specular, gloss, when you adding custom decals to albedo.

Gordon Robb

The way I've tried it is just go to your Albedo tab, and click on Add Clean Layer. You can then use that to paint on, and mask away, and it is on all layers, so you can make it more spec or more gloss. I haven't quite worked out how to make it show in the normal yet.

Falkrum

Gordon Robb wrote: »

I haven't quite worked out how to make it show in the normal yet.

Thats the main trick!