Substance Painting

This week has been a solid week of exploring Allegorithmics Substance Painter program and using it to texture my Wild West shopfront idea. I have to say it's been going really well. There isn't too much to report interesting project wise, I've mostly just been chugging along.

I think that my whole shop idea is really starting to come together now it's got some proper texture work to it. Things that were questionable or I wasn't sure would work in concept are actually working like the turquoise bright painted wood.

I managed to make this work by using Substance Painters layer systems to have a simple stylised wood under the paint, and then having that show through in some places. I did have some starting difficulty here as I managed to lose 2 days worth of texturing work at the start. There are always teething problems when using new software, and this is my first real work with Substance Painter other than quick tests before the Uni year started.

Below is the stage I'm at now. I have one whole week left and have 2 sheets of texture work to do in that time. I think I'll easily be able to finish this off and spend any extra time I have polishing it all up. I'm currently working on re-unwrapping some parts of my model. I've learnt that with Substance Painters non destructive workflow I can alter the UVs and make something much better. This is perfect for me as I always seem to make some mistakes in unwrapping and I love that I can go back and change things.

I'm a big fan of how it's starting to look. I'm getting warier that yes this is a kind of boring shape for a building, being a traditional shape used in the kind of setting I want, but I hope the texture work evens that out. This being a stylised project fits my own kind of painting style better which makes this all much easier. But also Substance Painter is making my job easier too. It really revolutionises how to texture and paint models. I wish I used this software last project and I might of been able to do something better.

This week I've also been having some thoughts about my FMP and my future. I've realised that for the last two of these projects I haven't been focusing on what I want to do. I don't want to make assets, ideally. What really excites me and makes me want to push further is level design. For the rooftop project I forgot about that, and this project doesn't use it either. I'm looking now to start researching and getting some books about level design as a whole and maybe do something related to it for my FMP, instead of making environments straight out. It's something I need to talk to my tutors about to see if and how I can do this.

#Shop #GameArt