@sacboi, thanks for the kind words, mate. I always like reading through threads with a bit of a breakdown so I thought I’d take the time to develop one for anyone interested. And because it’s nice to have a look back on the project this way, once you’ve completed it, I feel.
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.
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#
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:
Having created the platform I still felt something was missing…an environment!
So I set about building one. The elements were created in Zbrush/3dsMax, and the scene assembled in 3dsMax. About 10% of the geo in the scene is kit-bashed from a Vitaly set and Zbrush IM brushes.
The great thing about building a cylindrical environment is that it’s so useful to be able to ‘steal’ shapes from the topology. All the pipes are spline shapes extracted from the main set so they already in place, and as they are editable splines I could make use of this powerful toolset in max. Also, any object can have it’s pivot aligned to the main set and be clone-rotated for perfect placement very easily.
I then began texturing. I didn’t need to put as much work into this stage as the environment would be in the background and probably depth-blurred(which it was) but I was addicted to Substance Painter at this stage so I didn’t care…
For texturing a lot of the background props i tested out a tiling texture idea I had in mind for Substance Painter. I just imported a square proxy plane with UVs from 3dsMax and textured it using tiled maps and procedurals. You get the normal/height, and roughness for free as you’re working across the whole material at once. Plus the all the map detail is synced. Then I just exported the maps using the same Vray preset.
And an example asset. So quick to do as you don’t even need to unwrap the UVs. You can just apply box-mapping or use the Vray tri-planar-tex map.
And bearing in mind that this is a background prop, this is good enough. Spend time where you need it. I could have just used any old shader but I like to use personal projects to test out new ideas/workflows so it’s never time wasted.
With the scene assembly/lighting rig finalised(after days of experimentation/testing ) and everything in place it’s time for final renders! NOTE: not as exciting as it sounds…
The character was saved out as a Vray Proxy for the final stages of rendering
I will often printscreen a render in progress from the frame buffer and just start experimenting in PS whilst the render is still ongoing. This will be a noisy/grainy image but it doesn’t matter as it’s just for testing purposes.
Call it impatience… but it’s great to be able to get ahead of yourself and try out different ideas just like sketching. No matter how crap it looks, as nobody will ever see it…oh!..wait!..too late…
And at last…the finished render(or one of them) Straight render with a few levels/colour correction tweaks, but no paintovers.(background did get some painting work) The background ended up heavily blurred, and I also exported a VRay Glare and Bloom pass from the Vray mesh lights to composite.
Oh man, terrific work and a bit difficult to gage where to focus attention as we’re spoilt for choice plus he’s seriously taken on a personality all his own
Really awesome and inspiring.
I am trying to follow a similar workflow to yours for a very small project of my own and I have a question. I’m trying to texture something and add some normal map details in Substance Painter using alphas. Is there a way to drag out and stamp an alpha, similar to how I might do it ZBrush? I’ve tried the stencil option, but it’s a bit clumsy having to paint over the alpha with another brush.
