Glass & Tunnel – a fun combo!
Starting off the new year, comes textures to buildings, at last! I wanted to work my way towards the harder buildings to texture, so instinctively, I started with the glass tunnel as a tunnel of glass is always a pivotal way to convince viewers that futurism is a concept in this enviroment. Luckily for me, substance painter has a glass smart material that worked wonders! I opted to using that over blenders Glass BSDF as if I wanted to add any more details to the glass, I could be able to do that without issue.
Now this glass tunnel also included the supports, as I feel going for a whole glass look to really reaaaaally push the futurism.
To get my glass to actually be seethrough or opaque, there were a few settings I had to change, mainly, changing alpha settings to allow light to passthrough the texture, both in the actual node settings itself and in additional viewport settings for the texture.
With these settings tweaked! It now means the glass is seethrough and will also display that way in the final render, including be able to see the other objects and their textures through it, wonderful! Also during this process, my lecturer gave me some criticisms about the whole tunnel and supports being made of glass. Whilst yes it was futuristic, it also seemed a bit tacky, so I decided to separate the supports from the tunnel model, and I took them all into substance painter at once to give them a really strong look. I went for a strong black as the base colour, and made use of a smart mask to add height to the object, giving it that damaged look.
I’m a massive fan of how you can disable base colour and only enable options such as height and normal, or even metallic, it really added a whole new layer of depth to my understanding of substance painter, and I really hope to make greater use of it throughout the rest of this project. I’m very optimistic about what I can do for these models.
A Flat and a Bore
Straight after I had finished texturing the tunnels, came the texturing of the big block of flats that I had created, and tried really hard to make look as futuristic as possible. For my main buildings, like the terrain, I have a specific colour palette that I am making use of, as I feel these colours do represent the futurism type, and are all sleak colours in their own way.
I also learnt that before you do anything in regards to texturing a model, you need to bake that model in substance, so it can determine the values of all the edittable functions, such as normal, world space normal, height, thickness, etc. I personally find the baking screen quite mesmerising.
Whilst texturing this building, theres one tool that completely changed everything for texturing, and that is polyfill. Polyfill made it so that I could accurately plan the shifts in colour for my building, as well as organise the shapes I wanted to create based off my UV map, it saved me so much time and grief as supposed to hand painting features, and even then it could’ve looked off.
I was incredibly happy with how effective and efficient it was at making the basecolour process feel, however I dont think I could’ve used this tool for the terrain base colour, that needed to be hand painted. As for this though, worked like a charm.
Continuing on from the basecolour, I wanted to experiment with using alphas to add more specific details and colours to my texture. However, I was unable to use it with a mask sadly, I’m not exactly sure as to why it didn’t allow me to properly use a masked alpha, so I had to resort to other methods, including a paint along path brush that drew my alpha in a straight line as I wanted it to be, and it actually turned out better than if I was doing it with masks.
Now finally, came all the normals, height, bump, materially textury look and all that to finalise the look of the fancy flats that had been ridden with decay. The plating look also comes from a smart material! Carbon fibre: I removed the base colour, normal and metallic feature of it, and made sure to assign its mask to base colour, that way the height still influences the texture, but it looks flat and more like plating as supposed to an exterior additive.
Overall, quite happy with this! and I learned an absolute ton about substance painter working on this, I am going to apply this same process to all the other buildings I am making as it was quick, efficient and honestly quite fun to work like that, so I shall apply it to all the other buildings I am going to work on, in differing styles and matters.
I also managed to texture the tunnel systems that go into the sides of the canyon terrain, I had a different approach to that, I did a more painted shtick for it of the darker colours in the palette, and I didn’t add the carbon fibre material to it, as it already looked quite metallic, sorta like camoish at the same time too, very industrialised look compared to the flats.
Quite a lot of work done for this week, and a lot of things that I have learnt from my substance painter findings! I will continue to expand on these in the coming weeks I recon, hoping to quickfire through the rest of the buildings so I can move onto rendering! See you in Week 13!