For this project, I originally had ambitions of rendering out my assets in the Unreal Engine and Blender in the form of still images. I found this to be a little too ambitious to learn on top of Substance Painter and Maya. I have used Blender in the past but did find that the node editor overly complicated when compared to Blender’s fairly simplistic approach to applying textures.

Luckily for me, Sketchfab provides a good look at the models I’ve created in a similar manner to a video game engine. Because of this, I found that using Sketchfab to showcase my work is the best course of action, besides being interactive for viewers and assessors to look at and analyse.

Following my electronic press kit, I decided that the best place to showcase my work would be on ArtStation as it allows artists to show their work in a professional manner without the need to have a fully created website. It also allows for Sketchfab models, pictures and videos to all be shown in one page.

Link to the final output Artstation page.

In order to bring the textures from substance painter into Maya and apply them to the model for rendering, I used the Arnold renderer. For this, I started by applying an Arnold standard surface material to the barrel.

From here, I could input the texture maps into the subsections of the material. I found Maya to handle this really easy as a lot of the sections were easy to find and allowed for me to easily input the maps.

After this, I added an Arnold skydome light. This provided a plain white background for the renders as well as evenly lighting the model. For the render settings, I used png as the output with Arnold renderer being selected for use.  I also selected 1920x1080p resolution to provide a high quality still to display my work.

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.