Blurring the Lines Between Modeling and Texturing

Seeing what the community creates with our tools is the most exciting aspect of our work. We develop tools made for specific workflows, but we’re always amazed to see how some users experiment with the Substance toolset, exploring and extending them to new levels. Artists will always find new opportunities to express their art.

As software developers, it is our mission to spot when the community is onto something. It was already common for users to use height and normal maps in Substance Designer in order to avoid sculpting painful details onto the model. Soon it became evident to us that we should take this tendency a step further and provide features that will help the community actually “shape” their model through texture data rather than sculpting directly on a mesh.

When we released displacement and tessellation support in Substance Painter 2019.1, it was our first step towards facilitating exactly this. Soon after, we saw users develop a new number of workflows suited to their specific needs.

The most obvious benefit of adding details through texture data is of course to avoid sculpting them during the modeling process and gain in flexibility and freedom granted by parametric materials and procedural texturing. This means a lighter mesh size in a non-destructive workflow and steering clear of the sometimes lengthy and troublesome back and forth between your modeling and texturing apps, and all the steps in between.

BEFORE

AFTER

But it is also very flexible in terms of workflow: your low-poly mesh may be enough if you add in the details through height and normal maps and thus avoid the sometimes painful process of converting to high poly if you work with real-time or mobile devices for example. But you can also choose to use a displacement map or tesselate your mesh thanks to height map information in order to achieve high-poly mesh fidelity for offline rendering. Until very late in the process, you still have that level of choice and control.

One of the many examples we can show here is the brush set created by Genci Buxheli, which are made to sculpt directly in Substance Painter thanks to displacement and tesselation. Read more about it here.

Today, our vision is to blur the lines between modeling and texturing. We want to provide the community with tools to do exactly so. The goal is not to bypass the modeling part, but to bring modeling and texturing closer and more collaborative.

To explore this emerging workflow, we worked with creative designer Hussain Almossawi. Our idea: work with a very basic low-poly model of a sports shoe and let Hussain add in all the details using displacement in Substance Painter. We’ll leave it to Hussain to explain what happened and tell us more about his creative process.

Concept and sketching

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Modeling

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Coming from the footwear industry I might have had a good feel for making shoes and proportions which made it a bit easier. But shoes can get tricky sometimes, and for this shoe, I started with my sketches and references of other shoes to make sure my proportions were on the right track. I started my modeling by creating a basic box and molded it to resemble the shape of a shoe. What was important for me was to have three pieces of geometry that I could then play with within Substance: the upper, midsole (cushion), and outsole (grip). As for finding the sweet spot, I guess it’s just bringing your silhouette and overall shape to life, and then that becomes your canvas to play with and sculpt on, just like anything else that you would sculpt in 3D sculpting programs.

Displacement in Substance Painter

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I hardly use any intense sculpting tools when it comes to 3D, but with displacements in Substance, it was just as simple as using Photoshop; both the interface and tool are extremely simple and effective to use. The best and most effective thing about the whole process for me is that with a click of a button I can change the displacement map texture, and get a whole new geometry within seconds, it’s crazy!

As for displacements in Substance versus modeling, other than saving time, the beauty of it is how non-destructive the process is, and building layer over layer of complexity, which can be fine-tuned and adjusted easily at any stage. Another big advantage is how light the file is: It’s basically a very simple mesh with the magic happening through the textures, rather than creating crazy geometries that make the file heavy and, in some cases, hard to go back and fine-tune quickly.

This was the first time I rendered my project using the built-in render engine in Substance, and it’s really well done. I chose one of the HDRIs that comes with Substance, and all I changed was my environment color, making it a solid white backdrop, and rotated the HDRI at an angle that gave me the desired shadow intensities I had in mind. The renderer is very easy to work with, and interactive/real-time, so it’s just a matter of positioning your model the way you like it, and at the camera angle that you like.

As for the animation, I exported the substance textures for Vray and imported them back into 3ds Max, where I applied the maps back on to the shoe along with the displacements and other maps. The animation render was done using Vray 5 for 3ds Max.

This project was the first time I played around with displacements much in Substance, and it was super easy and fun to work with. It all comes down to saving time on your workflow and doing things quickly, effectively, and as photo-realistic as possible. There are a few things that I felt made the process more effective, such as the following:

3D Printing

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The real strength of creating things quickly with displacement isn’t only for visualization purposes, but also for prototyping and effective 3D printing. With this model, I was able to export the final outcome as mesh, and the great guys at Mimaki were able to print it for us, which looked more than real. In the footwear industry, we always used to 3d print, and it’s becoming the faster way of looking at results in your hands and getting a better feel for the lines and shape of the shoe, instead of waiting a couple of weeks to get a sample from the factory which you don’t end up liking. Again, it’s all about speed and efficiency.

Final words

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Substance has found its way into becoming a very important part of my workflow and pipeline, both in terms of saving time and achieving really nice photorealistic beauty shots. My next projects through my studio, Mossawi Studios, are a wide range of things ranging from footwear, architecture, and automotive and CGI Animations, in which Substance plays a huge role in the CMF and material explorations part of the product.

Have fun and dream big!