<time title=“April 27, 2016 12:44AM” datetime=“2016-04-26T16:44:47+00:00”></time> Another Vray look-dev test with the SP material taken a little further:
I like this character concept. You’re doing a really nice job on him too. Thanks for sharing your workflow. 
@webhead , cheers mate. Thanks for the comment.
Some more Substance Painter screengrabs:
And another early Vray look-dev test
Some more SP screengrabs:
So by now I’m sure you can see the benefit of creating/using smart materials. Think of texturing an entire game like this, ensuring consistency across all assets with the same material theme. And also the ability to change the colour scheme/dirt/grime/scratches very quickly by just tweaking or enabling/disabling layers.
The texturing is gorgeous! I gotta say, the weathering on the parts is damn near photo-realistic!
@skyways128, thanks for the kind words. I really enjoyed the texturing process on this project. It was the first time I seriously used Substance Painter on a large-scale project like this, and I am quite happy with the results. And so are you, it seems. 
more SP pics, a comparison pic from SP viewport to Vray render…and a shameless plug for a Gumroad tutorial I put together when I finished the texturing…replete with cheesy promo. Gumroad link if anyone’s interested https://gumroad.com/musashidan#
Enjoying this thread quite a bit. I am in the earlier stages of a similar type of personal project, so seeing the workflow is very educational.
BTW, thank-you for the YouTube channel, I’ve really enjoyed your tutorials.
@ Half Life, thanks for the comment. Best of luck with your own project. Glad you’re finding this and my YT tuts educational, and I hope that they help you in some way.
Here is a breakdown of the Smart material and the various channels in SP
All the armour pieces are a painted metal material and each one had a metallic mask. I usually start with a mask generator as a base to work from and using some custom brushes/alphas and some of the SP preset brushes I make use of the brilliant feature added recently in SP - the ability to paint directly on masks, as I always hand-paint on every mask generator I create.
All the armour pieces are a painted metal material and each one had a metallic mask. I usually start with a mask generator as a base to work from and using some custom brushes/alphas and some of the SP preset brushes I make use of the brilliant feature added recently in SP - the ability to paint directly on masks, as I always hand-paint on every mask generator I create.
For the project I created a set of simple custom alphas that I used in Zbrush detailing, and SP texturing and normal map painting. I also made a stencil sheet for decal painting. The alphas are easy to create in Photoshop: simple shapes at 512x512 and blurred more/less for softer/sharper transition when stamping. Heightmap alphas can also be created quickly in Zbrush using grabdoc for more detailed stamp details. Or in SP2 a normal map channel can be added which you can bake normal map stamps for.
Here are some of the rubber parts, textured using the same method of a custom-built Smart material across multiple assets.
And here you can see the normal map details painted to a map directly in Substance Painter. This workflow(and using the heightmaps from ZB) eliminates the need to create floating geometry for baking details to normal maps.
When all the armour/suit parts were textured I moved onto texturing/shading the head. Texturing was also done in SP, using the ‘airbrush’ method.
This is a popular approach to painting skin/organics and comes from the traditional sculpting/silicon mask-making techniques. Layering on the skin tones using different tones for different regions. This gradual building up of many layers can give quite a natural look and is a quite enjoyable process.
I painted an epidermal(top layer) and subdermal(tissue below the surface of the skin layer) map, which were piped into the Vray skin material.
I also experimented with painting a base reflection map(mostly derived from an AO/cavity/SSS map ripped from 3dsMax’s Render Surface Map tools) which I then duplicated and adjusted in PS for the glossiness map.
Next it’s onto shader look-dev in Vray. I always have my scene setup in Max and SP simultaneously, and just paint/adjust/save, test render…tweak shader…paint, adjust, save…render…tweak shader… NOTE: Just make sure you’re not using SP’s default .png file format as the .png plugin in Max is broken and the link to SP will not work. I usually use 16bit .tiff
This way you can pretty much get instant feedback on the results. Although I have come to realise that Substance Painter is pretty much a WYSIWYG environment and towards the end I was confident that the results in the Painter viewport are practically 1:1 with Vray. This ends up saving a lot of time as the test render phase can be a long…long step in a project.
And finally I can see how it’s all coming together. I often ‘printscreen’ renders and paste them to PS for quick adjstments/paintovers
as this can lead to new ideas, or inspiration.
So once I had completed all the modeling/texturing, and had everything assembled in 3dsMax, I realised that this bloke definitely needed some sort of base, or platform. So it was back to Zbrush again for some more hard-surface action… This time using Zmodeler/Radial symmetry:
The platform was also textured in Substance Painter using the very same techniques:
Looks really cool. Can you tell a bit more on how you created the subdermal/reflection maps in substance painter? Did you duplicate the epidermal layer, and then adjusted the layer settings on the new and / or painted more on top of it? It seems to match the epidermal quite nicely, and i’d imagine doing that by hand would be quite tedious?
@nikol, thanks for the comment.
Yes, of course. For the subdermal map I just used the epidermal as a base, adjusted the levels/HSL and went through the same ‘airbrushing’ painting method described for the epidermal. Layering it up with different values, then painting veins, layering, painting.
The process is actually quite fast, enjoyable, and gives fairly decent results the more layering you do. It’s exactly the same process I’d use in ZB to polypaint skin, but with the extra layering/masking control in Substance Painter.