Spark AR - Texturing (Masterclass Chapter 4)
What good is a model without some texture?! Now we get to add metal and stamp on details with alphas inside of Substance Painter.
The final textures are available to download on the Spark AR Masterclass website.
Texture Painting Programs
For the longest time, texture painting terrified me. I would just use cubic projection on everything and call it a day. But in order to become a real 3D artist, I knew I had to tackle the beast. Now, after understanding UVs, normals, and PBR workflows, it's no longer scary.
Anyway, enough with the monologue. Here's a list of programs you can use to create textures.
Substance Painter - recently acquired by Adobe, for better or probably worse. $18/month or free if you're a student! This is a lot of artists' go-to for texture creation. There is also a companion program called Substance Designer where you can create complex tileable materials from scratch. That one's much more complex, but super powerful.
3D Coat - this program is somewhere between ZBrush and Substance Painter. It's powerful, but the UI is rough and other programs do most of the things it does, but better. It is, however, one of the best options for retopology. $100
Quixel Mixer - less traditional than the rest, Mixer offers deep integration with the Quixel Megascans library, giving you the ability to mix and blend 3D surface scans together for wild results. If you want to use photoscans as a base, this is the place to do it. And it's free!
Mari - texturing for production. I don't know anyone who uses this one, but it seems to be super capable. $62/month.
Layers in Substance Painter
Similar to Photoshop, Substance Painter uses layers that render from bottom to top. Each layer can have a black and white mask, giving you huge amounts of freedom to change the underlying layer while keeping the masks intact.
Mesh Maps
These are utility maps that get baked out as textures. Each one represents a unique type of data. These need to be imported or baked in Substance Painter before using any sort of smart material or smart mask.
Gumroad Alpha Packs
There are tons of prebuilt packs that include alphas, brushes, kitbash models, and more. For this course, I'll be using hard surface alphas from JRO Tools on Gumroad. It's only $6, so feel free to pick it up if you want!
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Learn how to make Instagram filters by following along with the Spark AR Masterclass on YouTube! Just hop over to the playlists page ( / eddyadamsin3d ) and start with Chapter 1.
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Spark AR Resources - https://www.eddyadams.com/spark-ar