Week 8: Texturing in Substance Painter, Baking Texture Maps

Week 8 focused on introducing us to texturing and baking texture maps. First lets start with what these terms mean. 3D texturing is the process of adding textures to a 3D object. This includes: creating textures (either from photos or from scratch), applying textures to 3D objects, lighting the scene and applying final details. And Baking is the process of saving information from a 3D mesh, to a texture file (bitmap).

So, there are things to make sure before starting texturing:

In the Maya file, Delete history and run a cleanup to check for Ngons and make sure to remove them. Freeze transforms and know the scale of your object with distance tool.

Remove empty transforms and organize everything by removing empty groups and having proper names for the meshes. Make sure there are no overlapping UVs or backward facing UVs.

Once done and you have a low poly and high poly version of the object, its time to bring it into the substance painter to bake maps. Marmoset is also a tool that can be used to bake maps. After having baked maps its time to start texturing.

We took a meetmat model for the exercise. Substance painter has a lot of features that make the process really simple. One of them is the layer system. It allows you to stack layers of texture on top of each other while allowing you to hide any texture. So to paint a texture you can use either a paint layer or a fill layer. And you can adjust aspects of the layer such as the height, metallic intensity, roughness etc. as you can see in the image.

There are also a bunch of brushes that give different textures. And then there's filters which are substances that transforms the content of a layer or mask, and alphas to give different effects as well.

In my independent study hours I started doing the adobe's series of texturing a spider-bot. It was a five part series that helped me with my fundamentals as well as teaching me about generators which are substances that generate a mask or a material based on the mesh topology using the additional maps setup in the TextureSet Settings, and smart materials . It also showed me how to make decals and rendering the object in substance painter and a few other techniques that can also help in texturing like using the ID maps to select and paint a specific part. And how to add effects like dirt, rust and other grunges.

Self critique: The output of the spider-bot looks good because I followed the tutorial step by step without really understanding some of the aspects. Maybe I need to try and do a few more tutorials like the ones in canvas and do try texturing one by myself after that.