How to get Skin War Paint

apollo580

Hi All,

I'm working on a character and want to get war paint similiar to this Orc I saw on Artstation:

Does anyone have a tutorial I can watch or explain how I can achieve this in substance painter?

Thank you!

Alex_J

Make a fill layer, adjust parameters to desired effect (add some height, high roughness, color, etc), add black mask, add paint effects to black mask, use one of the artistic brushes to expose the paint spots. 

Looks like there is some height blending so the paint appears to sink into the skin wrinkles. This can be accomplished with layer blend options or maybe even just done by hand.

Benefit of using a fill layer with a mask is that you can change the contents of the layer entirely at any point. Whereas if you use a paint layer, what happens if you decide you want red paint or it has too much height info? Then you have to spend a lot more time tweaking things in photoshop. Much more work.

apollo580

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

Make a fill layer, adjust parameters to desired effect (add some height, high roughness, color, etc), add black mask, use one of the artistic brushes to expose the paint spots. 

Looks like there is some height blending so the paint appears to sink into the skin wrinkles. This can be accomplished with layer blend options or maybe even just done by hand.

Benefit of using a fill layer with a mask is that you can change the contents of the layer entirely at any point. Whereas if you use a paint layer, what happens if you decide you want red paint or it has too much height info? Then you have to spend a lot more time tweaking things in photoshop. Much more work.

Thank you such a detailed response! This is amazing, I'll give it a shot later tonight

Alex_J

No problem. 

If you aren't already familiar, after adding your black mask right click on it and near the bottom of the drop down is "paint" which is how you do that. You can also add a fill, add levels, and so on. So you can plug your curvature map into a fill layer, or height or AO or some procedural noise or grunge or whatever, add levels to adjust it's falloff, then even put that whole layer into a folder and add a new mask on top of it all for something like a noisey overlay. Layers on layers on layers. Just be sure to name everything appropriately -- even if you don't expect to come back, you might. And you don't want an indecipherable mess.

Mess around with these to unlock the true power of painter! Just kidding, but seriously this is like, 99% of how I work in Painter at least because it allows non-destructive changes very easily. Anytime you can easily just try out any random idea you got in your head, that's a good thing.