So last post I started playing around with Substance Painter to texture the barrel prop I'd made -- this time my focus was to create and refine my workflow using only Maya, xNormal, Bitmap2Material (B2M), Substance Designer (SD), Substance Painter(SP), and PhotoShop. While I am nowhere near to mastering this workflow or the tools entirely, I can say for sure that anything I need to accomplish I can do so with just these tools -- hoorah.
This is the final product, rendered in Marmoset 2. I've discovered that SP's included post rendering software, Yebis, actually looks better than Marmoset. The only reason I didn't take screen renders directly from SP is because my texture file got corrupted. Luckily I had exported some test bitmaps but was unable to complete the texturing process as I would've liked. SP is still in Beta testing phase so I'm not particularly surprised nor frustrated, at least I got the test bitmaps out of it!. Next project I'll have a finalized textured item and be taking screen renders from within SP if my file remains untainted :)
The workflow on this project was, in order listed:
- Research and data collection
- Maya: Blockout, HP modeling (prop and kit-bash assets), LP modeling, UV unwrapping, transfer map setup, .obj and .fbx exports.
- xNormal: HP to LP normal baking.
- Substance Designer: Curvature and AO baking.
- PhotoShop: Compile and edit base texture library
- Bitmap2Material: Adjust texture properties; normal, height, etc, bake tileable diffuse, height, roughness, metallic stencil .jpgs.
- Substance Painter: All texture painting and post processing (ideally).
- Marmoset 2 (as backup): Image renders.
Research:
I wanted to get a basic idea of the wheel structure and texture so I did a little research online and found some base textures from www.cgtextures.com.
And the base textures from www.cgtextures.com
Unfortunately I didn't get around to accenting the metal with the copper texture before my file got corrupted, but there it is anyway.
After studying these and other research images online, I began the blockout phase of the wheel. I started with the Hub, then created a single Spoke, and a single section of the wood rim. I then duplicated the original spoke and rim portion and rotated them my 30 degrees to either side and then build the steel wheel section on top of those. This ended up being much more difficult than I originally thought because as I began to duplicate the spoke and rim portions of the wheel, I found that my math wasn't adding up for it to match up exactly -- causing much heartache later on in the project.
So I've decided that eventually I will retake some basic math courses, particularly geometry and calculation classes -- maybe even delving into some architecture eventually and save myself future pain, suffering, and time.
After creating the blockout I jumped right into HP modeling. I ended up with some pretty horribly translated edges on my normal map though and I think it's because I forgot to duplicate my original blockout mesh and instead, modeled my LP from scratch in orthographic views. This cost me both time and quality.
HP Wheel Hub mesh modeled half at a time
Finished HP Wheel Hub
Wheel Spoke
Wooden Rim
And assembly duplication
Then outer steel wheel portion
Next I started a mini hardware kit to plug into the model for normal map information
And plugged them in
I made adjustments to the HP mesh to get rid of 90 degree angles
And then modeled the LP version starting with the Hub
then the Spokes and Rim
Next I UV unwrapped and exported the LP version in .obj for xNormal baking and .fbx for everything else.
I opted to texture just a single portion of the wheel to allow for maximum texture quality and to save time.
I also exported a plane and the kit-bash hardware and baked them in xNormal so that I could add in some of the bolts on the wooden rim in PhotoShop as they were too large to bake with the HP mesh
I then took the normal map and LP mesh into Substance Designer and baked AO and Curvature maps
Now that the mesh and base curvature, normal, and AO information was built I moved onto editing and preparing my diffuse textures. Starting with the base textures I found in cgtextures.com, I edited out the bits and pieces I didn't want in PhotoShop like screws, scratches, bolts, etc and then saved the new images and imported them into Bitmap2Material. One of the greatest things I found with B2M is that you don't even have to offset and tile your image in PhotoShop -- B2M tiles it for you automatically! Good enough for stencils at the very least :) Not only does it do that, but you can then export Height, Normal, Specular, or any other information you want for your stencils to be used in Substance Painter. Yeah, pretty incredible.
These are the final stencils with diffuse, height, and specular (if relevent) 512x512 maps:
Aged wood color
Aged wood height
Rusted metal color
Rusted metal height
Rusted metal specular
Aged copper color
Aged copper height
Unfortunately I don't have any images of the work process in Substance Painter due to the corruption of the file, but I do have a couple different angled shots of the wagon wheel. The last leg of finalizing the texture process though is to import the .fbx mesh, baked normal, AO, and curvature maps, and finally the diffuse, height, and specular texture maps. Plug everything in as appropriate and begin texturing.
Considering how far Substance Designer has come and the incredible reduction in processing power as well as software stability, I really can't wait until Substance Painter is just as far along too :)
The next prop to build is probably gonna be a grain sack or something else as simple and quickly attainable -- I spent a lot more time on this than I planned and PAX Dev is getting closer on the horizon. Thanks for reading and I'll see you again soon!
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