The EASIEST Way To Paint Your 3D Game Models (Adobe Substance 3D Painter Tutorial)

Almost every hard surface model in my game Twisted Tower is textured and painted with Substance 3D Painter. It's an insanely powerful tool. So, when Adobe reached out to see if they could sponsor a video like this one, I was instantly on board. Painter is amazing. So, you can use it to paint weapon models all the way to character models and everything in between. And I can't recommend it enough. So, that's why I want to show you the basics of how to use it, the need to know stuff to making breathtaking 3D art for your games. All right, so I've got Adobe Substance 3D Painter opened up here. All I'm going to do is just close this little prompt here and go to file, new. And we're going to create a new project. But what's interesting is you start a new project by actually importing an FBX or some other 3D model art file. So, I'm going to go ahead and select our character model. I'm going to select the character Tpose. It's best to paint your character

in its T-pose. And then you can go into Blender and rig it up, add some animation, and I'll show you that at the end of this video. This isn't a rigging tutorial. I'm just going to show you at the end quickly how I did that. Now, there's a bunch of settings here that I'm not going to worry about. I'm just going to go ahead and click okay. All right. So, if we want to navigate our scene, I could press alt and leftclick to rotate. I could press alt and middle click to pan. I can press shift and rightclick to change our lighting. Now, keep in mind, this is not actually going to be part of our export. When we're done with this file, when we're done painting and texturing, this light will not be included. This light is only for this software to sort of see how things look in different lighting angles. I could zoom in obviously with the scroll wheel. And I can also, this is my favorite hotkey, press shift, alt, and

leftclick and then move quickly with my mouse to get really quick angles of our character. So, if your screen doesn't look exactly like this, just go to window views, and just make sure you have your assets turned on, your layers turned on, your properties, and your shader settings. Okay? And you could just select through different tabs here. These are your layers. These are your various settings, shader settings, your painter brush settings, your texture settings, and you have a variety of assets on the left side of your screen. Here you've got some generic materials that you can use. These are built in to Adobe Substance 3D Painter. You have your smart materials, and these are going to take advantage of the baked information of our object because we haven't baked anything. And if that if that's confusing, it will make sense. I promise. Because we haven't baked

anything. If I drag on this machinery texture here, there's not anything that happens. There's no cool effects, right? This this smart material here looks very different than what I just dragged on here. Well, that's because I don't have any baked information. Okay? And that will make sense in just a sec. I promise. There's a variety of other cool assets here. The ones that we're going to use are also the brushes, different cool brushes that we can paint on our character. Basically, as long as you have a brush layer here. You can draw on your character. You can also draw over here on our UV. We'll talk about this UV in a second. Keep in mind that when you're painting, you can use this symmetry button and it's going to put a line straight through the center. And I can draw things like eyes and a mouth, eyebrows, stuff like that. Looks wonderful, doesn't it? But anyway, that's just what the brushes tool is for. The alphas tool, I actually use this a lot. This tool is great because

you can import your own alphas. Basically, just black and white PGs or PSDs or JPEGs, and you can use these as stamps. So, this is obviously what our character looks like as a model. This is what his UV unwrap looks like. Now, most of you probably understand what a UV unwrap is, but if you don't, it's as if you took scissors and cut up this character and put them flat onto a table and started coloring on the wrapping paper. That's the best way I can describe it. Now, I'll be the first one to admit the Adobe Modeler unwrap, and that was in a previous video. Links in the description, it was not my favorite unwrap. Okay, I would much rather take my Adobe Modeler model, bring it into Blender, and add some seams and unwrap a clean unwrap in Blender. But because I

want to show you that you can texture straight out of Adobe Modeler in Adobe Substance 3D Painter, and you can get a decent result, we're going to keep this unwrapped the way it is. We're not going to cover everything in the view here, but we will cover this layers panel here. If I drag on this plastic smart material here, and then I drag on this plastic tool material, you can see it's stacking our layers over here. We have all these different layers here. If I add a mask to let's say this one right here and then use let's say the paintbrush to draw some white, you could see that the mask is now showing up. Right? So truthfully, masking smart materials is kind of half the work in Substance Painter. It's highly effective to just work with a bunch of masks as they stack on top of one another. I can add another bl mask here

for the plastic hexagon. All of the visibility is gone now. But if I start to draw here, you can see we're just creating something beautiful here. That's sarcasm, by the way. But hopefully you get the idea, right? It's kind of similar to Photoshop in a lot of ways. And as you can see, I can't paint on top of this red, right? Why is that? Well, because the red is over top of this blue. So, if I drag this down just like Photoshop, now you can see, right? We can see the red underneath the blue. Now, if I select layers, I can click the folder and collapse them to see all the stuff that's going on underneath the surface for our smart material. I can also click on my texture set settings, all of the different settings for our textures. I can also look at the paintbrush settings, right? All these different settings. In this case, if you wanted to change to black, you could go to black here and then erase stuff, right? If I

was to create a new, let's say, paintbrush layer and start painting, I could choose what my base color is, right? And I can do that all here in the paint tab. And there's a lot of cool settings here as well, like the metallic values of the material, the roughness values of the material. So, now that we have just a gorgeous model, we're done. Let's export this. Thanks for watching. Just kidding. Let's talk about the bake. Okay, this is actually probably the most important aspect of understanding Painter. If you understand how to bake your model, you can make it look really good really, really fast. So, I'm going to go ahead and delete all these ugly layers here by pressing delete so that we're back to square one. If I click on this little croissant here, I think it's a really cute, adorable icon, but it means bake,

right? It's a croissant, so it means bake. Um, it takes us to our baking panels here. Now, the way you want to look at these bake panels is you want to sort of start here and move your way down here and then here. Okay. So, that's sort of the order of things. So, in this case, what's our texture set list? Well, we've only got one texture set list. So, I'm just going to go to 2048 by 2048. We can go to our mesh map baker settings here. We can choose to bake certain things. So, we can bake a normal map. We can bake world space normals, the ID, the ambient occlusion, the curvature, position, thickness, etc., etc. Now, because this is such a simplistic model, all I'm really worried about is the ambient occlusion and also the curvature. If this doesn't make sense, hang tight. I promise it will. So, I'm just going to go ahead and click bake. Okay. It doesn't take a long time. Okay. So, we've got a lot of different

bake information. Again, all the things we've put little check marks here too, we've got information for. So, if I go up here, I can see what information I got. Really, what I'm worried about is ambient occlusion here and also the curvature. So, let's take a look at the ambient occlusion information. And you can zoom in here and see what kind of information we got for ambient occlusion. Do you see how the model already looks 10 times better? And it's just with this ambient occlusion information. It's just basically adding shadows to creases. That's really all it's doing here. Okay. I don't really like how harsh this black line is here at the creases. I'm going to make sure I click on the ambient occlusion tab here. And I'm going to increase the min oludder distance to 0.25. And I'm going to click

bake. Now you can see those harsh black lines are now smoothed out. So overall, this information looks really good. Adobe Substance 3D Painter is going to be able to use this information to create some really cool effects with the smart materials. So let's go ahead and return to painting mode here. I'm going to make sure that I get in the right view. I'm going to go to material and let's go ahead and drag something onto our character. What if we drag this creature teeth material? So, as you can see, it's not perfect, but overall, you can see here it's using the curvature and also the ambient occlusion bake data to start adding roughness and dirt in those crevices. So, all of a sudden, it looks a million times better. If I were to go to my texture set settings and delete all of the bake

data, so let's say the ambient occlusion, get rid of that. Get rid of the curvature data. You can start to see we start to lose what makes it actually look like a real model, right? With all that curvature data and the dirt and the in the crevices and the ambient occlusion added. Again, let's go back in time and just see what it looks like with the correct data. Looks very different. So, you can see why baking is so important. Even for a model that's not unwrapped perfectly, still looks pretty freaking good, especially for an indie game. Okay. Well, how do we paint certain sections of our model? Well, we use masking and we also select various faces. What you want to think of is start with the base layer of our character. What would that be? Well, his skin, and then maybe his

shorts, then his shirt, maybe his hair. And in this model, I'm actually going to paint his eyes and his mouth as actual PNG stamps or alphas as opposed to using actual shapes. So, let's start with the skin. All I got to do is just drag the skin on. Now, the skin is not just some pink color. It's a ton of different material settings here. So, we can change the base color if we want by selecting the base right here. Then, we can click here in this fill tab and we can change the values of this material. If I wanted to make them a little bit less saturated, maybe a little bit darker here. Maybe I didn't want it to be so shiny and feel a little bit more like a ton shaded character. I could bring the roughness up or down, right? Make it look a little bit softer here. Now, let's go ahead and throw on well some jeans. All I got to do is well,

drag a denim material. So, let's just throw that under the character. Don't freak out. We're just going to mask out the majority of this character. So, what I'm going to do is add a black mask. A black mask is going to add black to the entire mask. So, you can see it's all gone now. And what I'm going to do is slowly fill in his pants. Now, obviously, I could use the paintbrush here and paint on his pants. The problem with this is that you might start painting on parts that you don't want to paint, right? And that can be really challenging. So one solution is just to paint over here, right? But the problem with that is sometimes the mesh kind of is connected to another mesh. So for example, if I paint here and try and paint on this little island here, you can see it's painting on the shirt as well. So what's the solution here? The

solution is this polygon fill tool. If I select this, you can see now I can see all of the different polygons. And what you can do is you can just select various faces here and start painting by just simply clicking on those faces. Now you can also click and drag to fill in large blocks of texture. Now this is a totally valid way to fill in texture on your model, but sometimes it's a lot smarter to jump on over to the UV on the right side and fill in over on that side. Now, because this UV isn't perfect, you'll notice that we have some other portions of the pants we need to fill [Music] in. You may notice that I'm able to rotate this UV. The way I'm doing that is by holding Alt and clicking. And it

makes it really easy to draw straight lines by selecting certain areas. So I can continue to rotate here. Drag, drag, rotate, drag. So rotating is a quick way to paint various objects at different angles. All right, let's go ahead and move on to his shirt. We can use this fabric dobby aged. Give it a little bit of worn down texture along the seams. And again, we could just add a black mask. And let's go ahead and change the colors a little bit of this base layer to something like a teal color. Let's see here. I like that. Looks good to me. All right, let's just go ahead and select the top layer here and add a black mask. Again, I'm going to use the polygon fill tool, and I'm just going to fill in this portion here just to get an idea of

where it is on the UV. Okay, it looks like over here is well, the majority of where his shirt is. So, I'm just going to add in a white mask here for his shirt. All right, we can go in and be a little bit more surgical here and add in some of his shirt here as well. So now his shirt is added. Let's do his hair. I'm going to go over to my materials tab and I'm actually going to use cotton for his hair. I don't know, it's going to feel kind of like maybe a claymation character. So maybe I could type in cotton here. And looks like we have this cool cotton here. I'm going to drag it towards his face. Again, it fills in the entire character. Don't worry, though.

We can mask it out. First off, let's just go ahead and change the color here. Sweet. And again, let's just go ahead and do a black mask. So, click the mask button. add a black mask. And hey, let's just fill in where his hair is. The first step here is to go to our polygon fill tool. Make sure we're at white. And I'm just going to click. And you can see it's filled in some of his hair here. If we look over at our UV, we can see that this is most likely all of his hair. So, let's go ahead and just start dragging. Now, if you don't want to keep dragging and being super precise here, if you know that an entire island or chunk of your UV can be filled, hey, let's just go ahead and use this right here, which is the UV chunk fill. I'm going to select that and just click. All right, let's go ahead and do his sandals as well. We're going to use the fabric

baseball hat. I'm going to drag that on there again. Mask it out using a black mask. We can even use the UV chunk fill on the model. We don't have to necessarily use it over on the UV. So, for example, if I know that this is a separate sort of chunk or island, which it's probably these right here, I can actually just click here, it will fill in those chunks. So, let's try this out and see if it works. So far so good. There's a few mistakes here that we can resolve. Looks like this part of the UV here needs to be filled as well. So, we can get a little bit more precise there by selecting the triangle fill. And I can slowly go in and be a little bit more surgical here. If we go to the top view here, we can just create a very

simple strap. And there you go. We got a flip-flop. Now, if I want to create eyes, eyebrows, and a mouth, it's actually only going to be two shapes that we're going to create in Photoshop, and we're going to import them as alphas. So, in Photoshop here, you can see I've got a white canvas here. It's 1920 by 1920. I'm just going to go ahead and fill this in with black. The black means well, nothing. It'll be completely transparent in the alpha cutout. And then I'm just going to go ahead and create his eye. So I'm just going to draw a simple oval here. I'm going to fill it in with white and transform the selection. Squash it down. Maybe look it a little wider here. And we're going to create something like a classic sort of Disney eye here. I'm going to center it up. I'm going to save

this into my project folder. I'm going to call this eye alpha. Let's go ahead and create the mouth and eyebrows as well. I'm going to save it as eyebrow alpha. Okay, let's go back into Adobe Substance 3D Painter. I'm going to go down here to the plus icon, click add resources, and I'm going to go ahead and add my eye alpha. And let's do another one. Let's do our eyebrow alpha. Make sure you define them. So, I'm going to define it as an alpha and click import. Now, you can see they're both here in our assets under the alphas tab. So, if I go ahead and create a new paint layer now, I'm going to make sure the symmetry is turned on. That way, the eyes are perfectly

symmetrical. And I'm going to increase the size a little bit here. So, I'm going to put them right about here. But we want to make sure that they're black. I'm going to go ahead and put them right here. You can see they're very shiny. So, let's make the roughness one. and just select just like that. Find a good spot for them. If we wanted to, we could rotate them a little bit by going to the brush section here and just change the angle just a little bit. Kind of like this. It's a little too much. We just want a subtle rotation. Oh, perfect. That's great. Now, let's do the eyebrows and the mouth. So, for the mouth, we want to make sure we turn off symmetry because I want a sort of off-centered mouth. I'm going to decrease the size here. About like this. Increase it just a little bit. Sweet. I love that. Got an offcentered

mouth. And then let's put symmetry back on and set our rotation sort of upside down here. There we go. And just click here. And now we have a perfect face. So we have our character. Let's go ahead and do one final alpha for his shirt. I'm going to create a new paint layer. I'm going to make sure the color is maybe an orange color. And I'm going to find a cool alpha here. Let's see here. That one's kind of cool. I'm going to turn off symmetry. Increase the size a little bit. Make sure the rotation is set up properly. Set it to zero. and click. Awesome. So that is our character and that is the basics of Substance Painter. Now we can export this for well Unity or Unreal or any engine you want to use these textures in. I can go to file,

export textures, and there's a ton of settings here. We're not going to go through everything, but there's also a bunch of templates. So, if we wanted to export for a game engine like Unity or Unreal, we could choose a variety of export options here. Now, most of my games are going to be in URP. That's the universal render pipeline for Unity. And I'm going to choose metallic as metallic tends to be the industry standard. Now, we can go to our list of exports. These are the all the different PGs that are going to be exported that we can use inside of our game engine and drag it onto the mesh that was created from Adobe Modeler. So, let's go ahead and export these. Let's open these up by clicking open output directory. Our files are here. Now, we can import these into Unity or if you're like me, you like to bring them into Unity by just copying them over into your assets in the actual project folder. Now, you may be wondering after you've exported your

textures, do we need to export the model? Well, Adobe Subs 3D Painter isn't necessarily uh a modeling tool. So, we don't really need to export the model because we already have the model. Now, if you want to rig the model, you could do that in something like Blender. And I'm not going to go through everything about rigging in this tutorial, but I can just show you that I've taken my model that was exported from Adobe Modeler and I've just rigged it up really quick here just to show you this is kind of how the process works. So, when it comes to the full suite of software used for this character, it's created in Adobe Modeler, it's painted in Adobe Substance 3D Painter, and it's rigged in Blender. Now, this might seem complicated, but just know that 3D art tends to use a lot of different softwares before it reaches its final destination, which is your game engine like Unity, Unreal, or GDAU.

Hey, and don't forget that right now you can get a great deal on both Substance 3D Modeler and Painter through Epic Games Fab Marketplace campaign. Simply spend 25 bucks or upload an asset on the Fab Marketplace and you'll get a six-month license for both 3D Modeler and Painter completely free. So, if you've ever wanted to try out these tools or simply want a good deal on your next 6 months licensing, I definitely encourage you to check out the link below before the offer ends on May 31st. You can do so by clicking the link in the description.