Today I've been spending some time looking at reference photos of pufferfish as I use Mudbox and Substance Painter to create my textures. Unlike my previous experiments, I modelled into the sphere since I wanted the spines to be facing downwards (I wasn't sure how I could achieve this with a 2D displacement map). I've brought that model into both Mudbox and Substance Painter to create my height, normal, gloss, specular, and diffuse maps.
I'm finding that I prefer Substance Painter, but I do like the normal map I created using Mudbox so I may play around and combine the maps I am making. I also think that my textures will look better (or at least different) once I bring them into Arnold since they will have subsurface scattering after I apply them to the AiStandardSurface material. I'm trying to not fuss over making it 100% accurate since I'm mostly trying to get it to resemble a pufferfish rather than it being an actual pufferfish. I like how it is turning out so far, but it still needs quite a bit of work...but here is my progress so far.
Since I experimented with Substance Painter and felt that both Substance Painter and Substance Designer could be useful tools for my project - I decided to go in and try Substance Designer. I was intimidated by Designer more so than Painter because it appeared to be much more technical. Rather than painting on materials - in Designer you create the materials/substances that can either then be brought into Painter or into other external software such as Maya.
I watched a few tutorial videos so I was aware of the basic controls, buttons and interface. I then found this tutorial on how to create an icy surface and decided to give it a try. I found it very difficult and confusing at first, but once I became aware that a lot of the nodes are similar to ones found in Maya (just named differently and sometimes work differently) things became a little easier. I strayed slightly from the tutorial since some of the screenshots explaining the steps were difficult to understand anyway.
I have not created the colours yet as I found these steps really confusing since the screenshots don't seem to match up with what is being said in the instructions. I plan to give it a try anyway, but I wanted to share what I've made so far. So far I've created a roughness map and a normal map that have scratches, various ice pebbles, and ice shards. I exported these maps and brought them into Maya (at the moment using Mental Ray).
I applied these maps onto a sphere using the Mia_Material_X shader and found it took a very long time to render probably due to the refractions and reflections in the glass preset. I also tried it out on a basic Blinn shader to see the difference in appearance and render time. I'll need to try this out in Arnold and make adjustments...I'll need to compromise between realism/what I want vs render time but it may also just be my computer being slow.
Mia_Material_X
Blinn
I then brought these two renders into After Effects to see how I could combine them and enhance the effect since each render had traits that I liked. I adjusted the colour and gamma depending on the effect. Here are some results and what blending modes I used.
Now that YPGTTO is essentially finished - I moved back to my other project that I've been calling 'When' (for now at least, this may change later on). I know that texturing is going to be an important component to this project. I know Arnold is going to be invaluable for creating realistic textures but I also wanted to experiment with Substance Painter. I've watched a few video tutorials on Youtube by Allegorithmic to see if it was possible for me to use this software or if it was going to be too complex for me to learn in the timeframe that I have.
However, I found it somewhat similar to Mudbox, except it is only really for creating textures and not sculpting. I actually much prefer the interface and tools compared to Mudbox for painting textures, but as far as I could tell so far...Substance Painter cannot create displacement maps, only bump/normal maps since it's not a sculpting software. For these few tests I used a few preset smart materials and altered them .
I watched another tutorial about how to export the textures into Maya. As long as the settings in Substance Painter are correct, it will create channels that get plugged into the various slots in the Arnold shaders. While I think some textures I'll need to create will be able to be made solely in Arnold - I think some textures may benefit from painting I could do in Substance Painter. I know there is also a piece of software called Substance Designer, so I may look into that as well just so I have as many options as possible to achieve what I want.
Some other features I really liked in Substance Painter was the ability to change the resolution whenever you wanted (you can start at a 2k resolution but bump it up to 4k later on and the program will recalculate the strokes you have made) and the ability to plug in your own images for lighting. I also really liked different filters that you can add onto your shaders such as colour correction, blurring, effects to achieve scratches/brushed metal looks, and several others.
