[music] [Christina Ryan] Hey, everyone. My name's Christina Ryan, and I'm a Lead Texture Artist at Industrial Light & Magic's Sydney Studio. During my time in the industry, I've had the privilege of working on a number of different blockbuster films and series, including Thor: Ragnarok, and more recently, The Batman, Deadpool, and the new Transformers One movie, which I am especially proud of and can't wait to share with you guys. So what exactly is a texture artist? So a texture artist is responsible for applying colors and materials to a 3D mesh and producing an outcome just like what you see here. Today, I'll be walking you through how I use Adobe's 3D Substance toolkit to really bring an asset to life and produce an image like this. This will be very beginner friendly, and the principles will be useful to you whether or not you're looking to get into visual effects, games, or even just level up in marketing your products by venturing into the world of 3D. We will start off in Substance Painter and begin applying materials to our 3D handbag. We'll then hop over to Substance Sampler to create any additional materials that we need before moving back into Painter and then just adding the finishing touches. To render and present our image, I'll be demonstrating Substance Stager to you guys, which is another really awesome tool. Throughout this presentation, I'll also be highlighting the seamless integration and speed at which you can move between the various software packages. And the reason why this is so cool is because it means far less overhead for us and more time to focus on being creative.
So let's go ahead and get started in Substance Painter.
So Substance Painter is a really popular tool used to apply materials to a model in a much more refined way, meaning we can really get granular with our material application. So what you're seeing here is the finished product, handbag, and this is where I've applied all of the materials to generate the look that you're seeing in the final image. So what we're gonna do today is actually build this from the ground up and I'm gonna show you how easy it is to create all the various layers and then come to this final output. So I'm gonna go ahead and switch this off and start from scratch. Now on the left-hand side is all of the different assets and materials that you can use that ship for free with Substance Painter. You can go ahead and create your own as well, but we're gonna see how far we can get with just what we have here. So if we just type and search for "fabric," you'll see that there's a variety of different fabrics in the Assets library. And if we don't find what we want, we can come over to Substance 3D Assets. Now this is a subscription service, but I can't tell you how fantastic this is. I use this every single day. And within here, this is where we really have so many more materials to work with. And now that it's integrated within the software, we can go ahead and just download this straight into our library and use it straightaway without having to download it from the Internet browser and then bring it in separately. And it's all about that seamless integration between packages, which is what I really love about Substance. So the fabric that I would like to use today is called Surge. And all we have to do is drop and drag that straight into our Layers stack on the right hand side. Now the Layers stack works very similarly to Photoshop if you've used that package before. And all it is is a series of materials and you just layer them one above the other, just like you would in Photoshop with flat images. So this is our surge fabric, and you can see a layer represents a single material.
So what we're going to do now is we're just going to make a few adjustments to this, to really get it looking like what we want in the final image. So to do this, the first thing I noticed was that the scale is far too big. So we're just going to go ahead and scale this down. And I'm going to just swap out the type of height information that we're using. Height and normal are different ways of authorizing textures. We tend to reserve height for really large details, whereas normal maps, we tend to use for smaller details. So that looks a lot more refined now. And I'm also going to go ahead and change the color. I'm looking for something a little bit more green. And within all of these materials, there's all of these really handy parameters that are exposed for us, and we can really easily come in here and just quickly adjust the color of this. So I'm going for more of a green natural look. So I'm going to leave that, something like that. Now if we go back to our material, what is the next thing that I want to add? So to make it a little bit less boring, I would love to add some embroidery and some stitching to this. Now this is normally a very painstaking process to be able to produce individual stitches like this. Normally, you wouldn't be able to get that level of fidelity where every single stitch is a different color. I thought this was really fantastic. And Substance Sampler is a tool where this is made super simple and super easy. I'm going to show you guys how you can do this. And this was a gamechanger for me. So let's hop over now to Substance Sampler. And what we're actually going to use today is Generative AI. I'm going to show you how easy it is to really dream something up in your head and very quickly turn it into material that you can very quickly move to Substance Painter. So all you need to do is change it from texture to pattern, if that's what you're after. And here, I've just written a simple prompt, orange flowers with green vines. And I'm just going to go ahead and hit Generate. And you can see here in the history, this is all of the various different images that I've tried and created, and this is the one I've created today. So if we go through, there's quite a few here. And, oh, that looks so pretty. And I'm a little bit spoiled for choice, to be honest, but you can always come and change it whenever you need. So I'm going to go ahead and pick this one, and all we need to do is drop and drag this into the Layers. Now the Layers works here in the same way as you would with Substance Painter in that it just builds up various different layers to produce your final input.
You then just want to press Use as bitmap and press Import.
Now just give this a little minute to go in.
Now once this is loaded up in here, you won't see anything just yet. The next thing we need to do is actually add a second layer, and what we're going to do is type Embroidery.
Let's find it.
And what this is going to do is take that image and convert it into a material so quickly and easily. So not only do we have this beautiful fabric stitched material and you can see that it somehow manages to work out, where every single stitch is a different color. I think this is absolutely fantastic. You can see that as I shine lights around it, it's even responding to light really beautifully. So it's not just a flat image. It's actually created a material. And this material can be sent straight to Substance Painter and used as we please. But we're not quite done yet. I would like to actually adjust some of the parameters of this because it's not quite what I'm after for our handbag. If you click on this Embroidery filter, you can see that there's a lot of different parameters here that we can adjust. Now the first thing I'm actually going to do is switch to the design from Fill to Outline. And this is really cool. I love this. So what it does is it essentially just outlines the flowers and has a cutout effect. And the cool thing about this is that when I bring this back into Substance Painter, I can change the material underneath it and then just pop this embroidery on top. So I'm not stuck to a particular material. I can have them as two separate layers. So I'm just going to adjust this even further. So I'm just going to reduce the thickness down a little bit, maybe reduce the length and increase the density. So get it to look more like embroidery as opposed to a thick blanket or quilted sort of stitch. There we go. And what if we decide that we want to change this later? It's not a problem. All we need to actually do is we could promote these parameters. And that way, these parameters will actually be accessible to us within Substance Painter. So what we're going to do in our material creation is I'm just going to look at all of the different parameters. All right. Which ones would I like to adjust later? Well, this is one that I like to adjust. So I'm going to go here, expose this parameter. I'm also going to expose this one and the Density, Thread. Why not? Imperfections. Let's do it. Why don't we just do them all? Why not? Can never have too much control. Right? So I think all of this is pretty good. I think that's enough for what we need. So we've just created our first material. So all we need to do now is come over to the Project settings, and we're actually just going to give this material a name.
And to give this material a name, all we need to do is come over to the Metadata on the right hand side. I'm just going to name it something that makes sense. So embroidery_flowers001. Actually, I'm going to call it 002 just to distinguish from the previous material I've made. I need to go ahead and fill these out. And the next thing, all you need to do is press Export. And this is a button I love, Send to Substance 3D Painter. So watch this. Just press this button and then you come over to Substance Painter, and look, there's your material straightaway, straight into the Asset Manager, ready to bring onto your mesh. So I'm going to go ahead and drop and drag this one on now, and you'll see that it sits on top of our underlying surge fabric. All I have to do then is increase the tiling. Wow. This looks so cool. And then you could come in and see that all of the parameters that are exposed earlier are here ready to go. So if I did need to adjust some of this, I can see that's a little bit too strong. I also am going to do the same thing as I did before where I just ticked on the normal and left the height off because it was just too strong. And I'm going to adjust the density and adjust some of this as well, just to get a little bit more white in this handbag. And that looks really cool now. So look. I think it's a little bit still a little bit too busy. So the next thing I'm going to do is actually apply what we call a mask to remove the flowers and only have them in the areas that I really want them. So to do this, all we need to do is go right click and Add a black mask. And then we're going to right click again and press this thing called a Color Selector. Now you'll see what this does. All I need to do is press Pick Color, and you can see that the object is separated into the various parts. And I only want this flower pattern to go into the dark blue part of this mesh. So with this pick color selected, I'm just going to press this one here. And easy as that, you can see that the flowers have only applied to this particular section. Now I actually think I want a little bit more. I'm going to pick a color and I'm going to add it to this part as well. And you can see how easy that was. Awesome. So let's keep moving. The next thing I am going to do is add some leather. So I'm going to just quickly search for leather, and I'm going to pick this one here. And what I'm going to do is just you can either drop and drag it straight into there. Let me just undo that. So you can drop and drag it straight into the Layers stack. Another thing you can do is hold Ctrl, and you can see this color selector comes up automatically. So I'm going to go ahead and drop it onto the handles. Now, again, the scale is all wrong, but that's good. Bear with me. I'm going to come back over to this mask, go to the Color Selector, Pick Color, and we're just going to keep adding it to the various sections that we would like. One more. I'm going to add it to this part here, and I think that's all right. Now we go back to our leather material and pop it back underneath.
I'm just going to increase the scale and the size of this to get it much more in line with the scale that we would see on a handbag this size.
Something like that, works well for me. And I'm just also going to adjust the color just a little bit to get a little bit more orange perhaps. Maybe something like that. A little bit lighter. No, it's going a bit red now. I think that's quite nice. Okay. And awesome. So next thing we're going to do is add some metal. And if we have a look at our reference, we have some gold. So all we need to do now, as you guessed it, we're just going to search for-- Actually, let's just go metal. See what we have. But you can see we've got gold, gold damaged.
Metal polished, I think, is a good one. Let's drop and drag that on. I'm going to actually turn height on this time, and all I'm going to do is just adjust the blending mode of this height channel. And if you're familiar with Photoshop, you understand what blending modes are. You just got to change this to normal, and the same with your normal map. And this is just going to make sure that it doesn't have any other layers coming through, but you only see the metal. And the idea is that we're going to cover everything with metal through once again, remove it in the areas that we don't want it. So what we're going to do is, again, this scale is too big, so we are going to adjust this later. We are just going to right click at a black mask to remove it. We're going to right click and add a color selector. And, again, just pick the color that we want. Okay? Now let's do the same for this section over here. Oops. This one here. Okay. And then I'm actually just going to increase the scale of this so the scratches don't look too much. And I'm going to just have a look at the parameters of this material because, you know, this bump on this is just a little bit too strong, and I really want this to look very delicate and very smooth. So I'm going to go ahead and reduce these scratches. Scratches density can come right down to basically nothing.
Scratches off. In fact, I hardly want any, to be honest with you. So I'm going to just switch that off altogether.
And I'm also going to decrease the roughness because I'd like it to be quite shiny, and I'm going to just increase the scale. We can always come back and adjust this later. The depth is just far too strong on this guy, so I'm pretty happy with that now. So I really wanted a clean metal because I'm showcasing a brand new handbag, right? So the next thing I'm going to do is come over to the parameters, and I'm just going to decrease the saturation a little bit because I just felt the yellow was far too strong. And I might just Hue Shift a little bit more towards the orange so it's a little bit more like a brass as opposed to, you know, a gold color. And I think that's pretty close to what we had here. Now couple more things that we're going to do to really set this off and, you know, add a few extra details. You can see here that in the reference that I've made, I've got this leather around the outside, and I also have these stitches. So I'm going to show you just how easy it is to add this level of detail, and it's super fun. So what we're going to do is we're actually just going to copy and paste this leather grain material. Okay? And we're just going to delete this mask for now because we're going to create a brand new one. What we're going to do is right click and add what we call a Generator. Now these generators, there's so many different types of generators that you can use, but the one I'm going to use is called Curvature. And this is basically going to use the information of the mesh, so details like ambient occlusion, where the edges are, where the crevices are, to very smartly apply this material. So we don't actually have to go in and hand-paint this ourselves. We can if we want to, but this is just going to make things so much easier. So with this curvature, we've got this on here, and I'm just going to contrast it up.
And change, you know, the bias of that edge. So you can see here that now we have a nice edge happening. And then what we're going to do is have it so that it only applies to certain parts of the mesh. So what we need to do here is Add a color selector. And just like we did before, we're just going to have that so it only goes on the parts that we want to see it. Okay? So if I hold Alt and click on the Mask, you can see what it is I'm doing here. So I'm essentially just building up this black and white mask just like I would in Photoshop with layers. So with this layer here and then this one on top, I'm actually going to change the blending word to multiply. And what this is going to do is blend those two maps together and isolate them to just the region that we want it. So now we have this really nice little curve around the outside of this. Lovely. We're almost there. And next, we're going to add some stitches. So to create some stitches, you can do this in a number of different ways. We look for the fabric. So let's type "fabric," and I'm just going to pick a basic cotton material and pop that one in there. Okay? And, again, swap it just to normal and increase the tiling. Okay? And we're just going to change the color from pink to, like, a white color. To do that, I'm going to just decrease the saturation quite a lot, and that'll do for now. And then we're going to right click, add a black mask. And this time, we're actually going to add a paint layer. And I'm going to show you this really cool tool that many of you would be familiar with if you are familiar with Photoshop. And this is the Path tool. Now, oh my gosh. I can't tell you how much of a game changer this has been. I absolutely love it. Rather than sitting here and painting scratches by hand-- painting stitches by hand, we can use the path tool to actually draw as a little path. And this could be edited at any point in time if we choose to, you know, move this around to a different location. Now once this is on, you can see that the path that it's drawn is way too wide. All I'm going to do is decrease the scale. Now you can adjust the parameters of this path up here and down here in the properties as well. So you can change the size and you can also change the spacing and various different tools like that.
So you can increase the spacing. You can also change the shape. So I'm going to look for a stitch like this one.
Now with the path selected, you can go ahead and adjust the size and the scale of the path that's being drawn. So you select the path. You come over to the size, and what you can actually do is come down and pick a shape. Now I'm going to go ahead and pick a stitch, and what we can do is increase the spacing in between that stitch. We can also press Follow Path so that the stitches move along the length of the path. And then you can go ahead and increase the size of those stitches. So the cool thing about this is that you can go ahead and move these stitches at any point in time. So if I want to just move this here and, you know, change the shape of this curve, I can go ahead and do that. So I'm just going to quickly adjust this now.
Okay.
Awesome. And you can go ahead and press Enter, and you can create multiple paths as well. So I'm just going to quickly adjust the material of this stitch. So I'm going to go and leave it like that. And I'm just going to make a little bit brighter. I think it's just a bit dark to see. Okay. Awesome. So this is how it's looking so far. I've just got one more finishing touch before we send this to Stager, and this is a nice little logo. For the Illustrator users out there, there's a really fantastic and easy way to be able to get your Illustrator file straight into Substance Painter. And I'm going to show you that very quickly. So we have this Adobe Illustrator file, and all this is is a vector. And I've got multiple artboards within this vector, so different logos and also just my name in the form of a logo. What we do is just drop and drag that in. And you can see that it actually automatically applies onto the mesh. So if you just drop and drag that in, now you can't see it just yet. Bear with me. So this is a flower I've got on here. What we're actually going to do is find that particular layer. So this is the layer it's brought in here. And the cool thing about this is that you can jump down and you can change the artboard inside of the painter. So we're going to open these guys up until we find the artboard. So you can see artboard line. And you can very quickly slip it out to artboard 2. So artboard 2 was my name and artboard 1 was just like a little flower logo. So we got this. And all we have to do is position this into place. I'm going to use the manipulator tool to just scale it down, move it, and I'm actually going to just have it so that it affects-- I just want it to affect the height just like you have like an embossed logo.
And I'm just going to go over to the material and reduce the height. So you can see that now it's just got this nice little embossing effect. And again, we can change this at any point in time if we don't like it.
Great. So we've now just finished our model and it's ready to send to Substance Stager. Whoops. I've just forgotten one last little thing, and that's this little buckle. So I'm going to just very quickly come over to the metal polished color selector, pick color, and just add that in. My bad. Now we are finished our asset. So all we have to do to render and present this is come over to our Asset Exporter here and just have to press this button here. Send to Substance 3D Stager. So I'm going to go ahead and send this asset now to Substance 3D Stager and open up Stager and you'll see that it will import it in for us.
Just give this a minute. So this is a file that I have already made and prepared for today. You can see that I've gone ahead and brought in our brand new handbag here. So the next stage of this is we're just going to go ahead and render and present this. I've downloaded some assets from Substance 3D Assets. So this is Substance 3D Stager. Now Stager is the perfect software to create our final presentation, whether it be to render a full turntable of your work or just a single image to market your product. You can start from templates like this one here or you can go ahead and create your own as well. So in this particular template that I've made, I've actually just gone ahead and taken a gloss backdrop and a table from Substance 3D Assets. And this is that package that I was telling you about before that I use daily. It's a subscription service with Adobe and it's absolutely fantastic. It's got everything you need. So there's no need to model all of these by yourself. So I just brought in a cloth and the table, and I'm going to go ahead and take the handbag that we've just made and go ahead and pop it up on the table. Now I'm just going to go ahead and hide the previous one that I've got there, and then just move this one into place.
And let's get it roughly there. And just switch the other one on just for reference.
Rotate it around, and that's about right.
Switch the other one off.
Now let's just get it sitting on the table nicely.
Okay. Now if you want to change the material of this at any point in time, you can. You just have to come over to the Assets section and we're going to search under Materials. And you can see that in Substance Stager, there's a variety of simple materials that you can very quickly drop and drag onto your mesh. So, I don't know, say you want this blue material here, you can drag it onto there.
All you have to do is just select the various parts that you would like and you can go ahead and add that on. Now, obviously, the material here is not quite the right scale. If you ever want to adjust the material of a particular component, all you need to do is click on the object, come over to Material, and just like what we did in Painter, you increase the scale of that material until you get something that better matches the look that we're going for. Now because I'm going for a very clean product image, I'm just keeping everything very simple and white so that we can focus on the handbag, which is usually the idea when you're trying to market your product.
So once we've got our meshes in, everything has materials. There's couple more things we need to add to our scene to make it render. So just like in the real world, you need a camera and you also need some lights. Now I've already got a camera set up in this scene, but to do so, all we need to do is press Add Camera. And this will then allow you to manipulate and move the camera around and into a position that you like. So this is where you might, you know, stage it and move it to a different location. Okay? And the next thing we're going to do is just add some lights. And luckily, in the Asset library, we don't have to manually create these lights and position them. All we need to do is come over to the Lights tab, find something that we like, and drop and drag it in. So I'm going to switch out to the previous camera that I've made. And if I go ahead and drop and drag these various different environments, you can see that the lighting changes very quickly and very easily. Now for something like this, I really just want a very, very simple studio light environment. So I'm going to go with this studio environment here, which I really love. And you can see that the lighting is just not quite in the right direction. So all we need to do is come over and click on this environment, come down to the rotation, and we could just swing around until we find something we like. Being a product render, we definitely want it very front lit to show off our product. We can, you know, do something like this, but always, again, change it later. And voila, this is our final staged image. So there's only one more thing to do now and that's actually render. So there's two ways we can do this. The first thing is if you've got a powerful GPU, you can just flip on Ray Tracing up the top, and this will allow you to get a very quick render on the fly. Once you're very happy with it and you like the look of this, so you can see if I move the light around, it's giving you such a fantastic accurate, like, ray traced render. It's so cool. And then once we're happy with that, we want to then go ahead and produce our final render, come over to the Render button, give this a name. Let's say Handbag_03. We can change some of the samples and some of the time at which you give it to render. So I'm going to pop it on high, then we're going to increase the maximum time. Leave it at 40. Then we're just going to go ahead and press Render. Now all you need to do is wait for your final image, and it doesn't take too long. And the fantastic thing is actually this renderer has a denoise expert, so all you need to do is render, you know, a maximum time of, say, 40 seconds. And then AI will come in and just help get rid of that final little percentage of noise and produce a really fantastic image.
Once this has finished, you can choose to export it as a PNG or even as a Photoshop file. And you can go ahead and manipulate it further in Photoshop if you wish as well. So once this is done rendering, you could go ahead and fit to screen and see your final image output that you've created. I really hope that you've enjoyed this tutorial as much as I have creating it. If you haven't already dabbled into 3D, I really hope this gives you some courage to pick up the toolset and incorporate it into your workflow. I really love that Substance has made this process so much more accessible to everyone. So no matter what experience you have in 3D, you can go ahead and create something that you'll be proud of. So please, I really encourage you to give it a go. Thank you, everyone. [music]
