Substance painter tips - Axis - Stevie Gill

Stevie Gill - Lead Environment artist at Axis studios (move summit 2020)

Being a team player as a generalist can be useful as you can be working on other parts of production, but specialising in something makes you an especially valuable worker. Substance is becoming more widely an industry standard and being used for realism when including substance designer materials. It is good to understand the node based system (e.g. substance designer/ Houdini), non- destructive development. As in the industry, most of the time things have to be re-done/ changed multiple times till it meets the vision of the producers, also nodes can save a lot of time. Models topology must be able to be subdivided, to allow them to be low enough to animate/ work with in visual dev, and also allow to increase poly count at render time for highest detailing possible, this can be very useful to up-res the poly count especially with close ups in shots.

Also having good topology helps make cleaner UV’s which if set up properly can also make texturing a much simpler process. when exporting mesh from Maya to substance designer, his process is to split object per material used, but you can also split it up by assigning different materials to each mesh UV set, this help substance painter create new layers for each material. and make sure to export a high poly version to substance, the best format is FBX (as this exports metadata) always bake mesh maps in substance. for more realistic projects, you can bring in tileable photo textures (eg from texture haven) and use them to create a new material in substance, by placing the maps in a fill layer. When you have seems showing, using the tri-planar function will project the material on the object rather than using its UV’s Always use world scale on your objects before importing as this effects substances calculations for textures and will look odd otherwise/ miniature. Never overlook The Roughness, seen so many showreels which don’t use and just takes away from its realism. utilise fill layers, by turning off Color channel for example, and have the layer only effect Roughness/ height etc.

Always name layers especially when passing it down the line as it can get complicated for the next person. And also try Reduce to as many layers a possible while still keeping the same effect. when adding new material don’t just paint it on, apply the material and mask it on/ off. when creating stylistic work always make your own materials.

The presets are ok for photorealism but always adapt them to fit.