04/12/23
I thought all my meshes and UV were all ok at this point, so I imported my scene into Substance Painter; unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and there were quite a few objects that weren’t UV’d properly. Some just had to be put on a separate material in Maya, but for some of them, it was the geometry.
This was the first trial for importing into substance, you can clearly see some of the issues
There were problems with the Boolean pattern for the fence, which made the UV really messy. I did have a lot of difficulty trying to UV that myself so I ended up just doing automatic UV hoping it would be ok, and it did look fine in Maya, so of course, when I saw this issue, I was very frustrated. For the bridge, I didn’t even know why there was an extra piece sticking out, as I had never seen this before on the UV or the object itself. Some of the issue was just that I had used the same material for different objects, this was a quick fix so it wasn’t a huge concern of mine.
When I UV’d the rocks, I initially used automatic, which laid each side of each individual rock properly on the UV grid but when I tried to put a sample texture on it, it ended up looking very blurry. Because I didn’t want my rocks to end up being low-detail, I thought it would be a good idea to lay every rock’s UV on top of each other, which ended up being a problem as I wasn’t thinking about how the details on the rocks would look like with all the UVs stacked. When I tried to put a moss mask in Substance Painter, it ended up being put in all the wrong places.
Although not all my UVs were properly done yet at this stage, I thought it would be better to start texturing the ones that were, so I imported an OBJ with all the good objects into substance to work on first.
I was very happy to see that even though the sample texture image I used in Maya showed the rocks to be low detail and blurry, it wasn’t the same in Substance Painter. As most of my scene is composed of stone, I played around with some of the options there, mostly sticking to concrete textures, especially concrete cast. For the rocks, I layered a few different types of stone/rock textures. I started off with the stylized stone texture, but I thought it looked too smooth, almost marble-like, so I added the stone slate. This one had more texture on it, which I think made the rocks look pretty much how I wanted them. I added a rock face just to fill in some of the empty cuts from the UV, which is why the opacity was so low. You can still kind of see some of the UV cuts, but I felt that it made the rocks look more textured, so I didn’t turn the opacity all the way down.
For the meshes that were part of the bridge and the gazebo, I used concrete cast as my base, as I liked the smoothness of the rocks. It was pretty much the same method for all these pieces, start with concrete cast as the base and add a paint layer each for moss and dirt.
because the scene is set where a lot of time has passed since someone was last there, so I tried to make all the textures look old and cracked. For the dirt, I focused on areas like corners or edges to try to make it look like gathered dust. Places around the water would also have moss on it, so if the placement was correct I put a moss mask on and add anymore if needed. If painting the moss on was necessary then I paint it on with either a dirt spot or moss fibre brush, the colours would pretty much always be on the lower left end of the gradient as I wanted to stay away from the bright saturated colours.
The left was my original texture; I layered a moss mask on top of a dirt base and added some mud and dirt spots to a paint layer. After a while, I thought it looked too plain. Playing with different brushes, I was looking for a brush that would look like dirt prints in the grass. Playing around with the settings on the dry mud brush, I changed the roughness of the black mask and started painting. It created a dent effect that looked quite nice. I painted on a hypothetical path the two people would’ve walked, focusing on areas close to other objects like the table and tree. I was quite happy with the result of this, it felt more alive and definitely more worn out.
Because I added the dirt marks to the ground, I thought it would be better to try to make the bridge blend in with the land more. Once again, using the dirt spot brush, I painted on some dirt on the edges where the corner was, and I also used another dirt brush to create the extra little bumps to create more wear. Finally, adding moss to the ends of the bridge to create some overgrown grass and moss, which I think made the two pieces flow better. I was very happy with this one as well.
The bridge was slightly more complicated than the rest of the scene as it was the only object that had to be painted in two colours. I couldn’t remember how to use the black and white mask so I had to watch a YouTube video to help refresh my memory. I wanted the sides and the base of the bridge to be different materials as the stylised wood had too much tiling on the surface that I didn’t think suit the sides. I wanted more subtle markings so I looked at other materials that weren’t wood related. I ended finding the paint brushed material that I thought had the perfect amount of markings. Using black mask I selected the areas I wanted to be different using select by poly, this was a lot easier than just directly painting on the UV as it kept going on different areas even when I was trying my best not to.
This was the final look of the first set of textured objects on substance. the process was a lot more fun than I expected, I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the project as it felt like I was watching the scene coming to life finally.