Minor Project: Experimenting with Substance Painter

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.