In this Essentials video, I want to give you a quick introduction to the substance painter tool, some of the ways you can use it and how layer's work, and how you import models into it. In this Essentials video, I want to give you a basic understanding of a little bit of how substance painter works and how we're going to be using it in our project. So anytime we open up a new project and substance painter, we're going to create something new. So in new we get the new project window. By default, it gives us metallic roughness which is usually what I choose. But what's really important is we need to be bringing in some kind of model file. In this case, I'm going to bring in this low poly version of the binoculars we'll be modelling later in this series. I have other options in here but what's really important is my document resolution is how high definition I'll be going. Generally, set this as high as you feel like your computer can handle even if your final product for instance is only going to be 1024 by 1024 as your final texture resolution size you want, setting it to double that and then scaling it down later will produce better results. I'm going to set this to 2048 for now. Although, usually when I'm working on a project, I'm always working in 4096. But if you're working on a laptop, you might have trouble with that. This direct X model format. So depending what you baked things from. If you've baked things out of marmoset, probably OpenGL is what you're looking for. But if you baked it from something like X normally, you probably going to want to indirect X. This compute tangent is space per fragment. I go back and forth by whether or not use this but it's usually based on the engine I'm finally taking it into. In this case, I'm going to leave this on. Then we can also bringing in any maps we might have baked outside, we'll be doing that in this series when we bring in maps from our marmoset. But for now, I just want to show you the program so I'll leave everything else off. So in here we see that we can rotate around my model and it has the exact same navigation as Maya which is really convenient for us. Alter option and left mouse will let us rotate. With middle mouse, we can pan, with the right mouse, we can zoom in and out. What's cool about painter is it gives us a lot of tools that we can just sort of paint directly on the surface. We start with this empty layer. By coming down into the properties for paint, we can see we can change the base color to something like red and we can start painting right on top of our model. Something that would be challenging to do with other programs or more like a traditional method of painting like in Photoshop. If I click on a surface and shift click, it'll actually let me draw out straight lines. I can hold control to change things like my brush size. So control and the mouse left and right affects my flow as you can see up in the corner if I want to create a softer or sharper flow. Then control and right mouse left and right increases or decreases the size of my brush and control right mouse up and down increases or decreases the hardness of the brush. So you can see I got a lot of different things I can work with here. I can also use just like you'd expect my erase tool to erase things away has all the same settings. But up in my paint tool, I have a couple of things that can change. For instance, I can also change all of these things from here and I can change the angle by control left mouse dragging up and down, will actually rotate it which will matter if I'm using something like an Alpha. So maybe I want to just stamp in a couple shapes and I can control and drag up and down to actually change the direction and rotation of that object. Sometimes you'll see things clip off. Right now I'm painting everything in my tangent wrap space meaning it's going to wrap around the object as best it can. But I can change some of these to be maybe based on the camera. So here it would fade away as it gets further from the camera or something like this which will clip off the areas versus this one came in a lot stronger, because this was set to wrap around. But usually the default is pretty good. So I'm going to turn this Alpha off really quick. So now it's just a plain square. Another tool that we can use is the stencil. So I can see I can add a stencil here and instead of using these as things like paint over my model, so I can use it as a stencil over the screen. Instead the white areas are something that I'll paint over and I can move my camera around to help me position where I want this to be. With the stencils, I can use the S key with the right mouse to zoom in and out, S and middle won't be panning and S and left mouse will let me rotate it. Then I just want to turn it off. Now this is a default layer. Another type of layer, this is that paint layer that we started with right here. When we create a layer like this, we're always creating a paint layer to paint on top of and it works a lot like say Photoshop where depending on what's on top of what, I'll see different objects through others. Another kind of layer here is this fill layer. The fill layer is going to create a solid single layer of in this case whatever color we want. So let's set this to nice screen. Now this is great sometimes for creating a base for everything. But if we put on top of everything it blocks all up, unless we add a mask. Masks are really powerful and to me this is where things inside a painter really take off. So I can right-click this layer and say add a black mask. We can see it's created as black mask and we don't see any green anywhere. What this means is any where there's black on this mask, I don't see anything, anywhere there's white I do. So if I click in this mask right now, I can see that I'm set to paint white and I'm revealing the color underneath it is what I'm doing. You can see right here it's pretty faint, but you'll see little white splotches pop up where I painted in. In order to remove this, I just need to set it back to black and now I'm painting black to the mask. Where this gets really powerful is where we start adding some selections to things. Things like generators, paint levels, layer's color selections. For instance, if I select this mask and then I click this little icon which is the polygon fill tool, I can now change the mask to white based on triangles, or quads, or whole objects, or even UV unwraps. So it'll just do it by a UV. Which is really great for just getting colored hit certain areas of things. We can always check out our UV two. Right now it's in the 3D only view. But in this upper right-hand corner, I can change it to a 2D-3D split and it will show me what my UV looks like and I actually can paint directly on top of this surface as well, which can be convenient although. If I'm painting in this space, I'll want to make sure that my settings are two UV because it'll be more accurate two UV space. But I just want to change that back. If I want to paint in this space and I can even change just 2D by itself which is sometimes a convenient way of getting a nice flat. Look at everything. We also have a ton of these really cool presets materials inside of substance painter and it's a great thing to just check out and try out by dropping onto your model. These are often really pretty cool if you want to get a chance to look at some of the settings in here. You can see the colors they use, some of the values that they changed in terms of roughness and metallic. If you're trying to get an idea of how these materials work and how you can make more complicated materials, it's great to just choose one of these at random and then open it up and see some of the different settings and how they're made and some of the settings that they use to create the different effects that you see here. You can recreate ones of your own for your own purposes. Of course, these work just like anything else where I can add a black mask and I can control it just using some of my default tools to paint in things. This is just a brief simple look at how some stuff works inside of substance painters. So that if you've never opened up before, you're not completely confused. I'll be going deeper into this when I get into the texturing part of this course but this should serve as a nice little UI introduction to the basics of how substance painter is going to work.
