Custom ID Map

Introduction

We are going to draw out an ID map using Photoshop, so that we can customise the material to use in Substance Painter. Relying heavily on faces, we will be drawing out the shape to use as an ID map. I will do this to have more control over the mask than just using faces.

We downloaded and extracted zip files from one drive and moved them into Maya. We then took a snapshot of the UV maps for the shield and applied the changes. I then opened the UV shield maps into Photoshop.

I used the effects stroke and colour overlay on the UV layer and created a background colour so that we could see the UV map. I then adjusted the size of the shield reference over the front face of the shield. Next, I used the magic wand tool to select the background colour and I used the lasso tool to shift and draw any part of the selection I didn’t want to include. Then I created a group and gave it a mask (ctrl + I to invert) and inverted the selection. This made it so that the front of the shield was the only part masked. Finally, I dragged the polygon image of the shield into the group I had made, underneath the UV layer, so that I could see where the shield is in retrospect to the UV map.

Next ,we used the pen tool to create a mask around the wooden parts of the shield. We can create a curve with the pen tool by clicking and dragging. Once we had the first side masked, we used the transform tool to flip the shape horizontally and scale both sides down to fit better. I then did the back, which was just the base colour of the wood with the ‘stroke’ effect on the layer that is the same colour as the gold (red)

I moved the ID map into Substance Painter and started to assign textures to the different colours and parts of the shield. First, I created a wood texture and imported some wooden textures that I downloaded last lesson. I changed the scale of the texture so it looked better and added a fill layer above for the dirt texture on the wood. I created a group for the wooden layers and started to work on the gold texturing. I made the base colour a gold-ish yellow and changed the roughness and metallic settings to give the layer a shine. I added a mask layer and started to import the ornamental textures into Substance Painter. I had some trouble importing the textures into Substance Painter because it didn’t seem to like the way I imported it in (two different ways) I had to Ctrl + A select them all from the zip file and drag them into the import menu. I then began to add some textures over the wood, using the symmetry tool to get both results on either side.

I had to make sure to use ‘X’ to invert the black to white, otherwise the ornamental textures wouldn’t show on the wood.

I then added a levels layer to the mask of the gold layer and adjusted the middle slider to make the gold textures stand out more.

Conclusion

I found this workshop for ID mapping pretty straight forward and easy to understand. I had some struggle with the pen tool, it would cover up the areas I needed to line out so I couldn’t see where I needed to go. To fix that, I had to start from a different angle. I enjoyed the Substance Painter work, I got to know how to use Substance Painter better and I liked the creative freedom in designing the ornamental decals on our shield.