Random Thoughts & Tips on Using Substance Maps

Started by wallworm, October 14, 2015, 11:59:03 AM

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wallworm

Some thoughts on using substance maps for general model texturing.

1) When using a Substance such as Bitmap2Material (B2M), it's best to use it on the materials going to your HIGH POLY (HP) model. The reason is that if you try to pipe your unwrapped textures into B2M, you'll not get the expected results for normal maps and specular maps along the UV seams. So use B2M in your high poly textures (before baking to Low Poly).

2) One technique that I've been using a lot for generating Substance-driven textures onto a HP model is Blended Box Mapping. This technique is helpful for grungy/dirty/noisy textures like stone. In this case, use one or more tiling rock textures that you make have created with B2M and use them in the three map slots of the BBM Mix map. You can get BBM in Neil Blevins' Soulburn Scripts.

3) Blended Box Mapping is a kickstarter for making some of your texture maps, but it has the problem of creating mirrored sections that are perpendicular to each UV channel's Z axis (where the W coordinates flip). This often leads to situations I call the Face Effect because in some models you see patterns mirrored in such a way as the brain interprets as a face. So to be effective, you will need to be aware of this effect and often use a few layers of texture maps often with offset UV transforms in the textures. BBM can also create stretched UVS in some models, so be aware of that too.

Those are my thoughts of the day.

wallworm

To add onto this. Above I mentioned Blended Box Mapping. But you may find an even better tool depending on what you are doing: Blended Cube Projection, which is also in the Soulburn Scripts. The only downfall is that sometimes the textures get some added noise.

warmeup

#2
I spent the last month trying to discover how i can create textures for my materials. I even tried to make them manually until you mentioned bitmap2material. Thank you so much. You're a lifesaver!

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