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Texturing a Character for Render Time Using Substance Designer and Painter

The goal of this project is to make a short film with 1 animated character and a natural background. Here is a video sample from the composited short film.

Short film showing character only — Post‑produced short film showing main character only.

These are the steps I'm following to accomplish this exercise:

Painting textures for material Opening UVW in geometry Extracting PBR textures for lighting Compositing textures

Textures for Material

This is what the character looks like once lighting and textures are applied in a material inside a render engine (Arnold):

All textures in one material — All textures applied to one Arnold material

And this is what the same textures look like when isolated inside the same material:

Diffuse texture — Textures rendered one by one in the same material.

Specular texture — Textures rendered one by one in the same material.

Note that the goal of using a third party software to generate textures (e.g. Substance Painter) is to make them transferable. You can reuse your textures independent of your render engine. In this case I'm using them first in Mental Ray and later in Arnold. Only the name of the slot in the material changes, but the functions in the PBR system remain the same.

Opening UVW in geometry

Here you can see the UDIM UVW:

UDIM UVW 1 — UVW from character UDIM after retopology. These UVW are the basis for the texture painting.

Importing Normal and Displacement Maps from ZBrush:

Face normal map — Distributing UDIM for normal maps

Legs normal map — Distributing UDIM for normal maps

Face displacement — Distributing UDIM for displacement maps

Legs displacement — Distributing UDIM for displacement maps

Extracting PBR Textures

I'm using the displacements and normal maps as a template for the rest of the textures. Color texture painted by hand:

Hand painting Reflectivity textures:

Face reflectivity — Reflectivity maps. I'm painting glossiness, specular roughness, and reflection color maps for the Mental Ray shader.

Legs reflectivity — Reflectivity maps. I'm painting glossiness, specular roughness, and reflection color maps for the Mental Ray shader.

Painting by hand Subsurface Scattering:

Face backscatter — Backscatter maps. I'm also hand painting epidermal and subdermal maps for the mental ray shader.

Legs backscatter — Backscatter maps. I'm also hand painting epidermal and subdermal maps for the mental ray shader.

Compositing Textures

The next step is to render the animation in elements (VRay) or AOVs (Arnold) into an EXR file queue and composite them in Nuke:

Composited textures — Compositing character EXR queue in Nuke.

If you want to find out more about PBR texturing, shaders, materials, lighting, rendering and compositing, click on these case study links:

Texturing Buildings

Texturing buildings for real time environment, modeling and UVW in 3DS Max, hand painting textures, applying to materials.

Rendering Prop

Rendering and Compositing a Prop Asset Skateboard Bag, Using Maya, ZBrush, Mental Ray, EXR, and Nuke.

Compositing Short Film

Compositing short film using Nuke by rendering EXR and grouping background, character, volumetric lights, simulations and optical effects.

Rendering Interior Env.

Rendering an interior environment through animatics and concept, HDRI lighting, texturing, simulating VFX with Maya Nucleus, rendering EXR, Nuke comp.

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