3D Texture Painting

I worked on a number of projects where I improved my texture painting skills with the help of Derek Flood. All of these models were provided to me and my work was to texture paint them with the models and UVs intact. I’ve divided these projects up into Hard Surface and Organic, explaining my process.

Hard Surface

Barrel

For the barrel, anchor points were essential for creating the rust effect. There is an incredibly helpful tutorial by Wes McDermott, head of Worldwide Substance 3D, that gives a thorough explanation to achieving this effect inside Substance Painter. This effect is very flexible and can be applied to various different texturing effects, not just rust.

Boot

The boot needed two versions, one that was clean and the other that was dirty and disheveled. Substance really comes in handy with its tools to make this very straight forward and non-destructive. You can easily make changes on the fly on every single aspect from the color to the level of weathering. The stitching was my favorite part of this project because creating a custom pattern was time-consuming but really brought more life to the otherwise simple model of the boot.

Organic

Rhino

The rhino had some UV problems that were easily fixable. For this project and practically all of the organic texturing assets, I utilized ZBrush for the creation of Displacement maps and/or Normal maps. You can achieve a similar result using only Substance Painter, but I felt more comfortable with the brushes and tools I am already very familiar with in ZBrush. I think having experience with ZBrush and organic sculpting/modeling is a huge advantage especially when it comes to texturing organic models.

Frog

The frog was my favorite project, simply because it was the one that allowed the most freedom in terms of design. For all of these projects, I gathered up plenty of reference images. They are essential for creating whatever look you are going for. I went through a bit of variations for the frog in terms of the color and skin texturing.

Mouth

The mouth, in contrast to the other two organic projects, was done exclusively in Substance Painter. The more subtle and minute details I needed were more suited for Substance Painter. It can be done in ZBrush but Substance beats it in the layering system which can sometimes be buggy in ZBrush.

Half the work is the material creation as it drives a lot of the subsurface scattering, roughness, displacement, etc. You have to be very conscious on what renderer your asset is going to appear in. The differences between a physically based renderer like Arnold and a real time renderer like Unreal are not massive but substantial that you need to plan ahead in order to not waste time when exporting and creating the shading materials inside the respective render engine.