In this tutorial, Creator in Residence @Kuroi001 shows you how to make textures using Substance Painter, which allows you to easily create new textures or edit existing ones.
Here is more information from Kuroi001:
Welcome to another tutorial, if you struggle with creating textures for your meshes this tutorial is for you.
Today I will introduce Substance Painter which allows you to create textures or edit existing ones.
To begin with, you have to import your mesh. Click on File>New select your mesh, choose your resolution and hit OK.
As you can see we have two different viewports here. On the right side we have 2D representation of your UV map just like in Photoshop and on the left side we have our mesh which you can rotate by holding ALT on your keyboard and using the mouse buttons. You can also use your wheel in mouse to zoom in and zoom out.
On the left side you have access to your assets like materials, smart materials, masks, filters, brushes and alphas. You can import your own textures, and lastly, you can change the entire environment of your 3D scene.
Let’s start with dragging and dropping a new environment onto the 3D viewport. As you can see the lighting of the scene changes. You can also change the direction of light by holding Shift and using the right mouse button and as you can see it represents shininess in the IMVU Studio so you can treat it as a guide.
Before doing anything else we need to bake our mesh maps. Go to Texture Set Settings, scroll down to the bottom, click on Bake Mesh Maps and you can choose what map you want to bake.
You can also import here your high-definition meshes here. Click on Bake Selected Textures, wait a few seconds and click OK. This will allow you to get access to more features like Ambient Occlusion and many more.
Now Let’s see Substance Painter in action. Let’s go to materials and choose a simple material.
Click on your material and drag and drop it onto 3D or 2D scene, go to layers and you can see that our material is applied here. On the bottom, you have the properties of the applied material.
To show you more features of Substance Painter I will apply a different texture and I will remove the previous one.
As you can see we can change almost every aspect of the texture like tiling, apply normal maps, change color, and modify roughness, which represents Convex Reflection in the IMVU Studio. Let’s go to the Technical Parameters and reduce the normal intensity and we have almost finished our texture.
You can mix different materials and apply them to the layer stack. You can also draw on the textures, add alphas and masks to create your own unique texture.
Now we are ready to export our amazing texture.
To do this go to File and click on Export Textures. I created a preset that will be perfect for the IMVU Studio, which you can download here, and import to Substance Painter. So go to Output Template and choose your IMVU preset.
To install the preset, just copy the file to the “export-presets” folder which is located here:
Windows : C:\Users\username\Documents\Substance 3D Painter\shelf\export-presets
Mac OS : Macintosh > Users > username > Documents > Substance 3D Painter > shelf > export-presets
You don’t have to change anything else because everything is set in the preset. Additionally, you can manually change padding with Dilatation + default background color and set it to 3.
Now click on Export then click on Open Output Directory situated on the top of the pop-up window. As you can see we have successfully exported our textures. We have textures with ambient occlusion, base color, normal maps and shininess.
For the Classic IMVU Client, you can export the 2D view texture by going through the same steps as above but choosing 2D View as your preset and pressing Export. This way you will bake all the information like shadows, highlights, normal maps into one texture and it will look almost the same as your 2D viewport in Substance Painter.
That’s all for this short tutorial, thank you very much and see you on IMVU.