Introduction

This lesson was an introduction to the software Adobe Substance 3D Painter. It started being developed by Allegorithmic and was then recently bought by Adobe. Substance Painter allows the user to paint 3D textures, shaders and effects onto 3D models, like painting in photoshop except onto a 3D model.

Models can be imported from Maya as .OBJ files into substance painter, which can then be exported to rendering engines and other software like Unreal Engine.

Using substance painter

I started by importing a model into substance painter from Maya, but before I could start painting on textures I had to select the ‘bake mesh maps’ option first. This would allow me to choose whether I wanted to render the textures in 4k or 8k

Next I covered a few features of the software – dragging the texture balls onto parts of the model will fill it in with that texture. Like photoshop, there is a brush, eraser and layers which can be used in conjunction with layer masks to add textures on top of a filled in texture without editing the filled texture permanently. (for example, this can be used to add scars and blemishes to human skin on top of a filled in skin layer.

Here you can see I used wood, plastic and silver textures to texture my metronome model.