Transitioning into substance workflow- Sci-fi Hallway

lamar McHaney

Hey Polycounters, I’m making this thread on my transition into using substance painter/designer in my workflow. Normally, I use Maya, ZBrush, xNormal, Knald, Photoshop, and an engine for presentation. For painting maps, I focus my efforts in Quixel, Zbrush, and photoshop.

The results usually end up something like this.

I’m a big fan of painting directly on the model. At this point, there's no reason to see seams in your textures. 

So now I’m getting into substance painter. The best way for me to learn is to put it into action. Some time back I was making a sci-fi environment, I haven’t had the time to really work on it. I’m taking this opportunity to jump back into it. I’m planning to put this in unreal 4. I Imported all the assets and created materials for the scene. I laid out a simple environment using some modular assets.

I will break down my materials in a little bit. I’m going to begin retexturing my little robot. The first step, Add some polys. Someone point out some time back the robot was a bit edgy. I defend myself at first, stating that the robot is extremely small. Based on the size it wouldn’t be noticeable. I was wrong.

Next step, change the type of metal I’m using for the robot. My original idea was to use steel underneath the paint but now I decided to go with aluminum. Aluminum is lighter metal, in my head, this makes more sense. Steel is heavy, Aluminum is light, a robot of this size would be able to hover believably. Over thinking? Probably, but it's an easy way to get started.

Aluminum is going to have a smoother surface.

Here are my results in substance painter.



Something I really like about substance painter is the ability to export your maps in different channels. For this project, I’m exporting the metalness to the red channel, roughness to the green channel and ambient occlusion to the blue channel. Diffuse/Albedo,  emissive, and normal map will be exported normally as their own texture.




I export them as targas at 1024.

So now I’m going to jump into unreal 4 and break down my material.

Albedo/Diffuse- Nothing complicated here.

Metalness/roughness/AO

As I explained before, I placed my metalness, roughness, ao map into one texture.

Metalness- red channel. I link it to the metallic section of the material. I also plug into a lerp, alpha section.

I placed a scene capture cube in the scene. I’m using this to create a secondary reflection. I only want the metal part of the texture to have a secondary reflection. The majority of the time, metalness maps are black and one. It seems pretty easy to plug it into the alpha section, plug the reflection vector into the B section,  and plug a 0 constant into A section. I also added a constant parameter for adjustment.

Roughness map- green channel. It's plugged into a multiplier with a constant parameter. Simple power adjustment.

Ambient Occlusion- blue channel. It's plugged directly into the AO section of the material.

Material looks like this:

Quick tip, when importing a texture like this into unreal, you need to go in the texture and uncheck sRGB checkbox. Also, sometimes unreal will put the compression settings to normal map, so watch out for that.

Emissive- It’s pretty  simple. It’s a texture attached to a multiplier with a constant parameter for adjustment.

Normal Map- Just as simple as the emissive.  Texture attached to multiplier with vector parameter.

And that’s it. This is the default material I’ll be using for the scene. I've also created a

Thin glass material:

Thick glass material:

Here is where I'm at right now.

There are still some things I’m trying to work on. Things may change obviously. I would love to hear any suggestions or tips moving forward, especially with substance painter. The lighting now is definitely not the direction I'm going. The robot is also not going to be that big, the robot is small, I increased the size to double check the texture. I’ll update the thread as often as I can as I progress.

Giacomo X

Everything looks good to me. It's just my opinion, but it's hard to get a sense of how your surfaces are working when 90% of the scene is still greyshaded...if it were me, I'd start by 1) working out the basic color/specular/diffuse values for everything in the scene and 2) getting  the lighting at least in the general ballpark--and then  start fine-tuning everything until it looks photorealistic. Trying to get the roughness right when you don't know yet how the scene is going to be lit just isn't good practice, in my experience.

As always, just my two cents.

lamar McHaney

Hey, @Giacomo X, Your opinion is very valuable here, I can always use advice. The majority of the scene is gray because it's a block out. It seems pretty standard among environment artist to block out their scenes, place them in an engine, and place simple lights. I'm using a substance painter workflow. I've created several smart materials that will allow me to maintain a consistent art direction while I texture assets. Putting a basic material on everything in the scene would slow me down. You need to place a texture that matches the asset especially with each one having different UV layouts. Also, I'm using a Metalness map, this replaces the specular map. It's basically a black and white texture map, whatever is white is metal and black is a non-metal surface. The base color/albedo will act as a color reflection for the reflection light color. Lighting can wait until you have all your textures completed. With some textures have emissives and assets bouncing light, it will be best to wait until all your assets are finished to add the final touches to your scene. This includes lighting, depth of field, color correction, etc. I'm a little bit confused about your roughness comment. Roughness is not the grunge/wear around the objects in the scene. A roughness map is a texture map used to determine smoothness on an object. A smooth surface is going to be shinier and give a clear reflection. A rougher surface is going to have a blurred/nonvisible reflection and dry surface. If you take a look at some of the environments done on polycount you will notice more similar steps in their workflow.

lamar McHaney

Here is a slight update, textured the doors this week . I wasn't able to get much done. I have other work that needs my attention  but, a step forward is a step in the right direction. I also created a twitch account and streamed substance painter this week, texturing the doors. I didn't save the stream because I didn't now how to; figured it out this morning. I have no set time as of yet but, I do plan on streaming regularly. You can follow me here https://www.twitch.tv/artoflamar  for updates when I'm on.

Daf57

Looks great - thanks for this thread!

lamar McHaney

No problem @Daf57 thanks for checking out the thread.

lamar McHaney

Update. Some floor and ceiling tiles complete.