Thread by @delaneykingrox

Game artists always benefit from learning how to leverage non destructive and procedural methods. #gamedev #SubstancePainter

This means setting up systems for tuning the results rather than just painting or baking on a fixed thing that is hard to edit. It makes you freer and faster.

Here I create a greyscale mask map that defines the bevelled ridges. I then reference that mask (using an anchor point) in other layers to create normals, dirt and AO.

So changing one changes the others.

This is handy because I can then import this into the game, play it and see how many ridges look good- too many could be busy or turn to mush when mip mapped in the distance. I can tune down the values and then hit export and the game updates.

Combining smart materials, anchor points and your own substance generators to make certain elements means you are empowered and can iterate quickly.

If changes are slow and painful, you will never get your best work done.

The same principle is seen here in my hand painted textures for Dungeons and Dragons Online. This was PRE substance, but I made use of photoshop layer effects to carry a lot of the work for me.

This is a simple bevel and emboss effect with an outer glow set to multiply. All I had to do is paint a white mask and the majority of the shading was done. This let me make fast changes and line up seams (we didn't have good 3d painting tools then so it was just photoshop)

This is just two or three layers with the same effect applied, to allow me to overlap details.

I then handpainted over the effect for touch ups.

You can see the exact same trick used here to create the trim. By thinking ahead and making effect presets and material type texture set ups I could do hundreds of textures fast.

And I do mean hundreds. So many costumes, weapons and monsters. All using smart procedural effects to keep me sane.

The same principle works in 3d as well. I used 3DSMax on Dragonage so I could form simple plates with a few polys- and have referenced modifier stacks to automatically apply smoothing, thickness give it a trim and uv that trim dynamically.

Blender is okay at this stuff, but Maya is terrible. Max is by far the best core modelling system because of the way it let's you stack modifiers and pass data up to the next modifier above- all in real time. All dynamic and reusable across projects.

I see a lot of people working by hand on things in a destructive or fixed way.

For example, putting lizard skin or leather texture on a bajillion poly model in zbrush and baking it.

Instead, you could do this dynamically in your texturing package- allowing you to...

Dial up and down the scales, change the scale shape and quickly brush out scales that don't sit well on the animating model.

Being able to dial in values and tweak shapes and brush in effects just gives you far more control and response time.

So yeah- best advice I can share is learn to make an art PIPELINE so all the stuff you have to produce is consistent, easy and fast.

Learn to make set ups that do the heavy lifting for you, and frees you to make artistic choices, or take client feedback.

Work smart. Learn non destructive workflows x

As always, you can butter my buns here:

Ko-fi.com/dellak

Oh and you can save a huge amount of pain by learning smart objects in photoshop.

Say I have my icons for every button or object in my inventory have a border or background... you can save it as a file and import it into each as a Smart Object. Change one, changes all

This means I can make, say, symbols used on my ship textures, flags and so forth all reference the same source image. If I change that, every texture gets updated.

This is great if you need to remove all the skulls and bones symbols in a Chinese release.

Like, store all your English words of textures and gui elements as smart objects and when you need to localise into Japanese or Italian, it's easy.

I made this in photoshop. It's completely unrelated to the lesson, I just think you need to smile.

(Bell peppers are called capsicums in Engand.)