Working with material IDs

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to take a look at creating a layer group then masking that based on a material ID. So here to start, I'm just going to look at my grip underscore barrel texture set. And so here I don't have anything enabled here in my layer stack. And so what I'm going to do is just come over to my layer stack and I'm going to click the Paint button icon to create a fill layer. So now we have a fill layer. Let's take a look at our shelf here, and let's come over to our materials, and here I'm just going to use this cobalt pure.

So I'm just going to just left-click, and that is going to just fill the channels here in that fill layer with the preset values from this metal material. So here I'm looking around in the view port, again Shift right mouse button just to kind of rotate the light around, here's kind of the metal texture that we have. Now the idea behind this work flow is that we have this single texture set, now remember this texture represents a material that we create in our 3D program. And when that model is imported here into Painter, that material ID is created into a texture set.

Now within this texture set though, we're going to end up creating different kind of material group sections. So right now, I have a metal, and that's going to work here for kind of this barrel muzzle area, but it's not going to work here for this grip. And I may want to have a different metal for these bolts and screws and such. So right now we have this fill layer, and it's just filling everything here within this texture set. So here I'll double-click to edit this layer, and we'll just call this Base Metal for now. So what I want to showcase now is kind of this start of the workflow that we'll end up using throughout the rest of this course.

So what I do in this situation, I have my texture set. And what I want to do is break my layer stack up into what I call material groups. And I'll do that using a layer group. So what I'm going to do here at the layer stack is come all the way over here to this folder icon, and I'm going to click to add a folder. And now I can take this layer, I can select it, left-click and drag and drop that right here into the folder. And so here, actually I'm going to call this Metal, and this fill layer, I usually use this naming convention, I just called is Base.

Because this is kind of the base start of my material and then as we kind of showed in the previous video, we're going to start to kind of layer on top of that. So here we have this layer group and I can click the folder icon to minimize this group or expand it here by again just clicking that folder icon. Here I have this little circle icon, if I just turn this on and off, that's going to turn the visibility off for the entire group, so within this group I'm going to end up having multiple layers with this. So what I want to do at this stage here is I want to set up a mask for this main layer group.

And there's a couple ways that we can do that. So one of the ways is with the layer group selected, I can right-click and I can choose to add a mask with a color selection. So that's one way. Another way is just to come over here to this Mask button, I can click this, and I can choose again add mask with color selection. Either way is fine, I typically just use the right-click. So right-click, add mask with color selection, so we do that, and you can see here that it creates this icon or thumbnail here, which is all black, and that's going to be our mask view.

And we can actually move between these two modes, and it's kind of important to think of it that way, like a mode. So right now we have mask mode, and you can see that we have this slight kind of white outline around this mask. And that means that that is what is selected. If I come over here to this kind of swatch area and I left-click, you can see now I get this blue outline, and that means I'm in kind of the layer mode. So this is layer mode, and this is, we'll click again here on the mask, this is mask mode.

And these two modes are different. We cannot copy and paste, or move data between these two different modes. So now you'll notice that we have our mask. And underneath that mask, you'll see that we have this color selection added. And so really all this is is a shortcut, so here with this effect here, I'm just going to come over and I'm going to click this X button here and get rid of it. So now I just have a mask. If I come over here to this Add Effect button, well here's the effect here as well, add color selection. So really all we're doing is a short cut to creating a mask, and adding a color selection.

If I wanted to do this manually, here's what it would look like, let's kill that effect, let's right-click on this mask, and here I'll just choose remove mask. So here, just to do this manually, we could right-click, we could choose add a black mask, so there's also an option to add a white mask. Now in Substance Painter, black denotes transparency, and white denotes opaque. So we want this to be transparent, so that's why we would choose a white mask. So here we've added the mask, the mask selected, we're going to click this effect button, and we're just going to choose add color selection.

So again, same thing that we've done there. It's just a shortcut by just using add mask with color selection. So now that we have color selection selected, if I come over here to the Properties, it's context sensitive, so you can see that it's properties for the color selection that we have selected. Here we have this ID Mask. Now this ID mask is going to be automatically set based on the ID mask that is set here in my additional maps. If I did not have an ID map here in this additional map input slot, then this would be blank and none of this would work.

Or I would have to manually add the ID mask. If for some reason that ID mask is not set here but I do have a texture that I want to use as an ID mask, maybe it's not something I baked, maybe it's something that I painted in a different application. I could import that as a resource, click this button, and just browse for that texture that I want to use as my ID mask. Here in this case, it's automatically assigned because we are using a ID Map that we baked. Okay so, now we have that set, all I have to do is just click this Pick Color button, and when I do that, the view port then is set into that additional map viewing mode, and it's set to ID as you can see here in the top left corner.

And now I have this little picker icon that allows me just to choose the color that I want to add as the mask or the ID. So this pink is kind of what I set up in my 3D program to represent where I want to place the metal areas on the mesh, so all I have to do is just left-click this pink area, and you can see that we've now masked this layer group here based on that ID mask. And if I had multiple areas, I could pick those as well, so here we have one pick.

If I click this picker again, and this time I'ma use this green as well, it's going to represent another metal. I'll just click this. And now you can see that we have pink and green from the ID mask, both of them kind of blend or mix together to create this mask. And here if we rollover our mask, we can see kind of a thumbnail preview of what that mask is. Another shortcut to that is if I hold down the Alt key and left-click on this mask, it then is going to showcase the mask here in the view port. So right now it's showing everything and that's a little confusing, so let's come over here to our texture set and just solo that grip barrel.

Now this is actually more accurately showing the mask that we just created here. And if I want to go out of that mode, I can just hit M on the keyboard to go back to my material mode. And then here I'll un-solo that. So this here allows me to quickly mask based on that ID, and like I said, when we covered this ID bake here a couple videos back in the baking section, you can see where creating or baking an ID map like this really speeds up the process of masking. Now in the next video, we're going to take a look at manually masking some areas without using an ID mask.