With the introduction of AI like midjourney, stable diffusion, dall-e, the creative community is alarmed. Some of it is due to the violation of IP rights and some are scared for job scarcity. But I am not here to discuss all that. Rather I am here for the satisfaction of making something myself.
This was one of my work from last year. I wanted to make something on the above topic. It was done with limited time. A lot of time was spent on gathering reference. Most of my 3D works are related to real life object. So it was new to me to do everything from scratch. For the limited time, I wanted to limit the scope of works as well. I was not good with sculpt that time. But still pushed myself to learn some brushes and use it.
My work pipeline for this project was creating base model in blender which includes sculpting and retopology as well. Then the model’s normal, AO, displacement was baked inside substance painter. The full texture was done inside painter as well. I love how it makes texturing easier which includes masking most of the time.
In this project I used UDIM and RGB-grayscale-packed texture as well. A lot of artist or clients tends to ignore or been unfamiliar with these methods. Some even make it sound way much complicated. But it is really easy to use and with the modern graphics advancements, the advantage should be leveraged.
Substance painter already has presets available of packed texture for export targeting most of the rendered engine such as unity, unreal engine as well as usual for PBR textures. However, I prefer to set my own packed preset with PBR roughness while exporting. Because in some cases or the last painter version that I used, when exported with the unreal packed preset, the base texture was exported as black or transparent. I still could use that texture by separating Red, Green, Blue (RGB) and Alpha channel in render engine, but for base material, that wasn’t supposed to be the case and might confuse a client or future team members. But PBR texture pack works really great. Below you can see the Base material or diffusion texture and metallic-roughness-height map packed texture. One of metallic-roughness-height pack was from unreal engine preset and other was from PBR preset. No need to worry, if they look different as it might be due to the set up of grayscale to channel configurations. It just needs to be remembered the RGB channel configuration for metallic, roughness, height and set them up according in render engine.
