How to easily re-paint avatars with Substance Painter

The Mission

You've probably seen our over 200 avatars. Ever wonder how we actually colour them? Or maybe you want to paint them yourself. 

Resources

• Substance Painter
• Your preferred 3D Modeling software (Maya, blender...)
• Your preferred image editor (Photoshop, Gimp...)

Setting up UVs

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How we did it

When we made our avatars we made the UVs in a particular. Each UV isle is one color, so that way in Substance Painter.

You've got your avatar ready, right? If you are in doubt, you should follow this few guidelines to make sure you won't have any problems:
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• Make sure the UVs only use one region. Basically, don't get the UV Isles out of the big square, Like in the picture.

• Every UV isle should be unwraped. In some instances this is not 100% necessary, but more often than not they should all be.

• Take as much space as you can.

• Always leave some space between isles.

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• You can put 2 isles overlapping, but its use is for only for very specific use like repeating patterns or letters.

If you think your UV maps are done, then let's go to the next step: PAINT!

Painting or re-painting

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Our avatars are quite simple in terms of painting, usually using a combination of flat colors, maybe some gradients, patterns to mix things up and letters in some cases. So, how can we make those?

We will use Substance Painter for almost all of that.
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First, you need to import you character. Use whichever program you know (Blender, Maya, 3D Max...) to export an FBX file.

Then in Substance, create a new proyect. Use the template which fits with your proyect and use the select button to find your fbx file.

Now you should see your character on the left side and the UV map on the right side of the screen.

On the top right corner of the UV map view you can select "Base color" so that way you can only see the colors without any material added.
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Now we will go on painting.

On the Layer tab, on the right, we will create a Fill Layer. This layer will serve as a color.
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On this new fill layer, we will create a black mask by right clicking it an Add Black Mask.

It will create 2 squares, one representing the color and the black one is the mask.

Click on the color and right under the Layers tab, scroll through the propeties until you find Base Color. You can select any color you want. Using the dropper tool you can even select colors that are on another place outside the program.

If you have the color you want to use, you will see nothing has changed. Now its time to use the mask we created before.
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Click on the mask black square, and go to the left of your screen. You will see a couple of icons. Select the Polygon Fill one. Right above it, select UV Chunk Fill.
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Now you can begin to paint.

Select whichever UV isle you want and it will get the color you said.

Repainting on avatar

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If you are repainting one of our avatars you can actually add the base texture if you want to preserve one zone like the original.

On the top left, new → import resources. Click on the Add Resources and find the texture you want to add.
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Make sure to mark it as a texture.

And import it to your current session.

Now that it's imported it should appear on the texture section on the shelf (Located on the bottom).
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You can drag and drop the texture into the base color on any base layer and with the help of a black mask, you can select which zones to use.

Exporting

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Once you have your final results it's time to export.

Go to New → Export Textures
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Click on the name of the material and deselect or select the maps you have used or want. For our avatar we only used Base Color, so we won't use the other ones.

On global settings you can change the directory output, the file type and the padding.
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This last one is important. Padding is the amount of pixels over a UV isle in which the program will draw over the limit. If that doesn't make any sense here's a comparasion between a texture with no padding at all (right) and 10 pixels of padding (left).

By default it's set to infinite, which is alright, but I usually set it to "Dilation + Default background color" and I set the pixels to a minimum of 8. That's why it was important to space out UV Isles.
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Once all the parameters are correct, hit the export button and done!

​Pedro Solans

3D ANIMATOR

​​Junior 3D Animator improving every day possible. Videogame and cat enthusiast.

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