Substance Painter is a ground-breaking new product that takes a lot of the busy task out of creating sensible textures and the new aptitude to paint with particles offers something that is unique. The fallout is both striking and simple to create artistic work. The one disadvantage of this package is the weak set of included help files, but these are strengthen with a large set of YouTube videos that you can access.

Here is the detail report: You can add detail to your 3D modeling. There are two paths. Firstly, you can add to the number of polygons in a model to add expressive details. Secondly, the there are two ways to add details to a 3D model. For one, you can increase the number of polygons in a model to add expressive details. The well-liked, crowed pulling modeling packages ZBrush and Mudbox are excellent at this, permitting user to sculpt superb models.

But, this detailing appeared at a minimum cost. Ultra high-res models, like those that are sculpted, are hard to imagine and don't work well in even the most advanced game engines.

This carries us to the second way to add detail to a 3D model - with textures. A sophisticated set of textures can make even a trouble-free sphere look incredible and with the use of normal maps, you can even replicate the sculpted effects of a model.

The disadvantage of textures is that they are difficult to paint and relevant to the models.

The typical workflow comprises of painting a texture and applying it to the model and then tweaking the mapping to make the texture fit the model and then go back to touch up the texture, then wash and repeat. This is an awkward process that takes a lot of time to get accurately.

This is where Substance Painter comes in the scene. Substance Painter lets you paint honestly on the 3D model with materials. The painter will compel you to paint with designated materials and the paint stroke brings up to date the texture once including colour, brightness and metals. This is a massive benefit, permitting artists to paint a touch in a single package all at once without the whiplash of moving back and forth between different packages.

Streamlined Workflow: Once a model is loaded into the Painter interface, all its present textures are mechanically identified and loaded with it. These can contain normal maps, ambient occlusion maps, lighting passes, etc. You then identify the specific channels that you want to include. The options include the usual judgment such as Base Color, Height, Specular, Opacity, Roughness, and Metallic, but you can also include Emissive, Displacement, Glossiness, Anisotropic, Transmissive, Reflection, Ior and several user-defined channels. For each channel, you can distinguish the format to use when the texture is saved.

After the channels are set up, you can then decide a material and begin painting. Each of the channels gets updated as you paint. You can also switch to solo mode to vision and work with a single channel by itself. Once the texture is finished, you can export all the diverse channels with a single command. Each channel will share the project name and will have its channel name added on. Since you can view and confirm the results straightaway within the Painter interface, there isn't the need to go back to the originating modeling package. The files exported out of Painter can be loaded and used straightway in the game engine.

Advanced PBR Viewport: Substance Painter isn't just a pleasant extension to your current 3d software (see Figure 1), it is a full-blown texturing package with its own interface, tools and an higher viewport that can vision realistic textures (PBR).

Figure 1: The Substance Painter interface includes moveable panels of presets and tools along with an advanced viewport for viewing realistic (PBR) materials.

Using Substance Materials: Substance Painter rationally uses the Substance Materials (Figure 2). Substance Painter comes with a large variety of materials pre-installed and ready to use or you can purchase and add several additional material libraries. The software also lets you import and use any custom GLSL shaders that you've made.

The pleasing thing about the Substance Materials is that they are beautiful. These shaders are built by material experts and they hold up really well under all kinds of lighting and environments. In addition to materials, the interface Shelf also includes a large collection of brushes, decals and tools.

These are alpha channel stencils that let you quickly add material details include bullet holes, zippers, frost, fur, bolts and rivets.

Figure 2: The default Substance materials included with the software offer a wide array of options.

Painting Tools: The accessible painting tools include Paint, Eraser, Projection and Geometry Decals. Each tool can be customized and tweaked with a huge assortment of controls including Size, Flow, Spacing, Angle, Jitter, Shape and Hardness. There is also a real-time interactive preview window that explains the results of the current settings. This is immense for double checking your brush settings before you begin your painting. There is also an evenness mode for applying paint evenly on either side of a designated axis.

Painting with Particles: One of the coolest available features in Painter is the new particle brushes. Using these brushes, you can apply paint using thousands of small particles and these particles respond to physical forces like gravity and wind so that weathering a model is effortless with realistic results.

Figure 3 shows a trouble-free sphere painted with several different materials using the Physical Brush tool. Notice the complicatedness of the results.

Figure 3: The ability to paint with particles is an amazing feature only available in Substance Painter.

Post Effects: Substance Painter for all time uses the Yebis 2 middleware, developed by Silicon Studio, to allow post effects within the viewport. The available post effects include antialiasing, color correction, depth of field, tone mapping, glare, and vignette and lens distortion. This lets you generate your beauty passes straight in the software without having to export it and reload it in your modeling software.

Exporting to Game Engines: Once you are through with the texturing workflow, the finished bitmap textures can be exported to several diverse game engines including CryEngine 3, Unity and Unreal Engine 4. You also have the option to export the textures as PBR, PSD files or as any of the standard bitmap formats.

Ref: gamedev.net