Aims

• Reacquaintance myself with Substance Painter
• Fully texture a model
• Utilise my knowledge of how to create realistic wear and tear on my textures
• Export my textures to Sketchfab for display

As part of my workflow i decided early on that I would be using Substance Painter, mainly due to the fact that I have had some prior experience in the software and also that I found that skills I had already learned in Photoshop (Such as layer stacking and masking) were easily transferred into this software.

Whilst I have already textured some models as part of this project, I hadn’t gone into too much depth with the software and mainly just applied a material and exported.

For my process I started off by using a steel smart material as the base of the gun, and turning off any preset effects within the material, such as scratches and dirt, with the intention of tweaking these to my liking later on.

Next, I began adding some more materials to the gun and using a mask as well as the polygon fill tool to only apply it to certain parts of the gun, such as the barrel and grip.

 

Once I was happy with the placement of my materials, I then moved back to tweaking the smart masks and generators within these layers, to try and give the gun a weathered, used look in areas where they logically would appear.

I came across an interesting way to achieve this by duplicating a base metal layer, placing it underneath itself, and then slightly darkening its color, giving it a water eroded type effect.

Overall, I was very happy with how this went, in terms of texturing my models, my mind is at ease simply due to how intuitive the software is.

The final textured gun can be found here.

What I learned

• How to create detailed textures and weather them realistically
• How to effectively use masks and generators on my materials
• Various shortcuts and keybinds within the software

What I need to improve

• Creating my own effect layers to a high standard
• How to paint directly onto my baked maps

Overall, the tutorial is very ideal for beginners or those looking for a refresher on the software, i’ve already recommended this video to a few of my peers. The only downside is that while it does cover most of the software’s features, it doesn’t go into much depth and is more of just a basic introduction.

Timelapse