When texturing in substance painter, I would start with my shape in Maya, normally starting with either a cube or a cylinder and extruding faces until I was happy with the result. Here I have created a barrel for my ship corridor scene using a cylinder. It’s not majorly intricate but with the use of substance painter, it can look a lot better and provide a sense of realism.

As someone new to UV mapping, I found that Maya’s automatic UV mapping provided a good enough UV map for the assets I was creating. Here, this is exactly what I’ve done, other methods such as cutting along vertices, however, I found this to be too time-consuming for the number of assets I was looking to create.

With the UV map done, I exported the object as an fbx file. I then opened this in Substance Painter and baked the curvature map. Baking the curvature map allows the user to add edge wear to the assets with a realistic look. Finding out how to do this changed my approach to texturing.

Here’s what the barrel looked like on a basic level. I used the base colour as being black and added the rust above it as an edge wear generator using the curvature map. Although the results aren’t the best, they’re still satisfactory for what I’m wanting to do. I can also export the textures in a higher resolution from Substance painter.