Augmenting smart materials - Substance Painter Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we will get to see the real power of smart materials as we quickly adjust and augment what we already have in order to make it a little more personalized and so unique to our project. Now again, because we are working on a very specific asset here, what you really need to do in order to gain the benefits of this video is to just see how quickly and easily we can adjust these materials to get the desired result that we want. So and take the time to study your asset. Think about what it is you want as an end goal and how you might improve these smart materials to make them look that little bit better, that little bit more realistic, that little bit more in line with the reference that you might have gathered beforehand and doing this will make this particular video useful because obviously the changes I'm going to make are for my very specific asset that I have in my viewport and although you can follow the steps and end up with the same result what I want you to do is take the principles from this video and then start to train your eye and your mind to apply them to your own assets. So once you have worked through this I really would recommend grabbing an asset of your own and chucking some smart materials on it and then really thinking through how you might improve them to get a more unique or realistic look. With that in mind then let's just see how much of a change we can actually affect without using anything else other than the smart materials already applied. We're going to make a start with our damaged leatherette material. In which we will, first of all want to really unify the colors of our assets textures by coming to the base color layer, clicking on it and then from inside its options clicking on the base color swatch, which we can set to values of red 0.5, green 0.47 and blue 0.3. Now I've just made that change so that things are a little more in line with the real world counterpart of our camera of which I have reference. This is a real good way of augmenting smart materials have a photograph up of the texture that you want to mimic and that will give you a direction and possible changes that can be made in order to augment the smart materials in a beneficial way. Now, this particular color change does mean that the worn parts are a little too bright and so we'll need a darker color in order to match the look I'm aiming for in my reference. Coming to the edges highlight layer then we can change its base RGB values to 0.32, 0.22 and 0.13 respectively. This now just starts to tie the smart material together so that it feels a bit more like they belong to the same overall material set. Whereas before it kind of did just look like, well we had choked a lot of smart materials onto an asset because that's what we had done but there are still so many more changes that we can make. So next we can move on to the base color for our leather rough smart material. Now, we want to set this to a value of 0.36, 0.26 and 0.16 for each of the RG and B channels. Now a good tip here and if you have reference material open is to use the eyedropper tool and just select a few different colors from the image that you have available. This can really help unify the entire color palette of an asset. It also means that well we're using real world reference as a guide and so it's only going to aid us in our photo realistic pursuit. We can of course go much further with smart materials than just making simple color changes and so let's adjust how the edge wear on our main leather texture is behaving. Now, one way in which we could do this is by adjusting and altering any of the mask generators added by the smart material. Now, as we will be covering this procedure in its own video, though we will instead look at another way in which we can adjust the parameters of smart materials. Coming back to our leatherette damaged material then let's click to select the leather pattern layer where we actually have some expos parameters that we can quickly adjust. This in our case being the distance setting, which will allow us to either increase or decrease the size of the cell pattern in the leather. Now a value of around about 12 should give us a good size for this particular material. Now it is probably good to mention here that if we like to create our own substance materials inside the substance designer application then any of the parameters that we expose on those textures, well they will be available whenever we come to use them inside substance painter, just as the case is here with this distance parameter. On top of this, we can also change which substances, stencils, alphas and more are used inside each and any smart material that we use as these aren't locked into place and so if we come to the leather base layer inside the leather rough smart material, we can see right at the top that the material mode is in fact using a leather rough substance and if we go ahead and click the box we can either change the substance being used over to any that is provided by painter or use a substance of our own that we have created. Hopefully you can start to see just what power is open to us simply by using smart materials in connection with the substance designer application. Now let's just select something obvious in this instance such as let's say the lizard scale substance and then right away note that whilst all of the folder structure, layers, generators and so on stay the same, we are actually using a completely different substance material. Flexibility, that I am sure you will agree can go a long way to what helping us and the smart materials available in painter and create much more realistic materials on each of our texturing projects.