How did I deal with…?
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.
These are the steps I'm following to accomplish this exercise:
Textures for Material
This is what the character looks like once lighting and textures are applied in a material inside a render engine (Arnold):
And this is what the same textures look like when isolated inside 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:
Importing Normal and Displacement Maps from ZBrush:
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:
Painting by hand Subsurface Scattering:
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:
If you want to find out more about PBR texturing, shaders, materials, lighting, rendering and compositing, click on these case study links: