3DCTM2
Substance Painter is a software that allows you paint textures onto 3D models in real-time so you are able to see what the texture looks like on the 3D model. In some sense, this allows you to precisely paint where certain materials should be on a 3D model.
As an example, if we take Rick Grimes hat from The Walking Dead, we could 3D model this and in Substance Painter, we would paint the hat with a cloth like texture, the bullets and sheriff badge with a metallic gold texture and the rope with a gold coloured rope texture. The rope is where Substance would be really handy because there is finer details in the texture itself.
The way Substance Painter does this is it uses textures that use maps. Maps are a component of a texture that make it seem like its got certain elements. That path in The Elder Scrolls isn’t as bumpy as it may look. Maps come in many different forms. There are things called Emissive Maps, Normal Maps, Roughness Maps, Displacement Maps, Metalness Maps and many more. These are often referred to in a process called Physical Based Rendering.
Physical Based Rendering is a rendering method for textures that attempts to simulate how light sources react to models, trying to make it as life like as possible. The way it does this is by using multiple texture maps to help create the simulated material.
- Emissive Maps are textures that are shown at full intensity, they receive no light so are always visible.
- Normal Maps are images that stores direction within each pixel. It uses the images RGB channels to control the direction of each pixels normal. A method like this is commonly used to fake high-detailed textures on a low poly model.
- Roughness Maps are images that allow you to control how sharp reflections are from the material. I think Marvels Spiderman on PS4 does a great job with these with the reflections in the Manhattan windows.
- Metalness Maps are images that assist the renderer in telling it what part should be metal-like material and what shouldn’t.
With 3D materials, there is also the Fresnel (pronounced “fre-nel,” the “s” is silent) effect. This is basically how much reflection you see from a material dependent on the viewing angle, Because such things exist in computer graphics, this means that we can actually alter real-world materials to make something as dull as concrete, look reflective, although it wouldn’t quite make sense. In the example below, we can see the centre of the material isn’t at all reflected but as it eases closer the edge, it becomes more reflected.
Another map I want to talk about is the Displacement Maps. Displacement Maps allow textures to cause an effect where the geometric points of the textures are displaced, allowing it to seem bumpy and have some depth, these are different to normal maps and bump maps as they are more intensive to render.
JORDAN | GLITCH ARCADE 