Minor Project: Using Substances in Maya/Arnold & Testing out Displacement Maps

Since I've begun experimenting with Substance Designer and Substance Painter I decided to try out importing substances into Maya2018/Arnold. I watched a few tutorials about it prior to attempting it myself so that helped...I still made a few errors but I think it came out alright in the end. I like using substances because you can have options such as the 'damage' channels that this tile substance has (although I turned them off in the end). For the 'Custom' workflow option on the substance, I like being able to pick and choose which parts of the substance you use. For example - I actually sound that I liked the specularity of this tile substance more when I didn't used the specular map since I applied a displacement and normal map to it.

It also took me a while to figure out the displacement map system for Arnold...although I haven't had much of an experience with it in Mental Ray excluding a few video tutorials from last year. I watched a few videos about the Displacement system in Arnold and came across a nice tip of using a setting in the Arnold render view to see better what the displacement is actually doing and if you have enough subdivisions to get the results you want. In the render settings under 'Render' there is a 'Debug Shading' menu. I found it useful to tick 'wireframe' so I could see if it needed more devisions or not.

I found a good online source for free to use substances on the Allegorithmic 'Substance Share' site. I hope that'll be helpful with creating a 'pre-vis' of some sort eventually as well as general experiments and perhaps some reverse engineering in Substance Designer so I can understand it better.

4 Iterations

5 Iterations