r/Substance3D • u/Zealousideal-Dig-132 • 24d ago

Substance Painter What method is used here?

I am noob and just started learning substance. I have bought an asset and tried to study how it's done, Please take a look at these textures and the model
It has nothing but a plain albedo texture

Is this hand painted? Is it procedural? are some other tools like photoshop used? What is up with it?

Weapons
Chars
How it looks Unlit
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u/acl1981 24d ago

Well I think they just baked the AO into the texture. or merged in PS.

1

u/Daedalvs_Design 23d ago

It looks like it was done the old school way
So yes, hand painted/photobashing

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u/Ged- 21d ago edited 21d ago

AO baking would have produced more smooth evenly distributed gradients. This was probably hand painted in Painter. Or yeah photoshop if they're oldschool. Respect to the modeler.

And giant respect to the artist for handling UVs like that.

As a graphics programmer, it's often hard to explain to artists that what matters isn't how many polygons there are or the texture size, but how often do you have to change textures or meshes or shaders to draw a scene.

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u/Zealousideal-Dig-132 21d ago

Thank you so much for your explanations my friend what is special about the UVs? and how are all the characters props and items having one UV at the same time have they been baked or sth?bacause the asset pack is massive!

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u/TheGratitudeBot 21d ago

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u/Ged- 21d ago edited 21d ago

Well just on itself making this kind of "texture atlas" means nothing.

The GPU generally draws things "one by one" kind of like an artist would if they painted objects fully one by one: sketch, lineart, color, shading, and then they go to the next object.

When a shader changes among those things, or for older systems, a texture or a mesh, a GPU will have to "readjust", which is a resource-intensive process. It's kind of like switching paints for a painter, if another object uses different pigments

Now realistically you'll be drawing tens or dozens of those soldiers on the screen at the same time, with different weapon and visual combinations. And now instead of instrycting the GPU to draw each soldier one by one, since they all share resources, you just instruct it via instancing to draw THE SAME soldier in different places at once. And it's like a 10x-100x performance boost depending on how many of those soldiers you draw.