A tip for sculpting/displacement/texturing

Hey, this is not a question, just a tip that might be useful to someone.

Sometimes when sculpting you might want to use texture in a brush, or if you want to add a specific displacement on an object, its hard to find the specific texture you want. It is possible to create the texture from a photo  in photoshop with highpass filters and a lot of clean up but its a lot of work.

Substance is a great source for these textures. It has a huge library of precedurally generated textures, just go to https://source.substance3d.com/ and check it out. They come in their .sbsar format, but its easy to export them into png or whatever format you want.

Just download Substance Alchemist, open the .sbsar file and then you can export any channel into other formats. Since these textures are procedural, there is also the option to tweak a lot of settings in Substance Alchemist to get the exact look you want. The height maps are really high quality and tileable, so there is no additional work required.

This can also be used for general texturing, just export all the maps you need. If you have the Substance license, you probably just import the sbsar into Substance painter and use it there, but sometimes you might want to tile the texture which cannot be done Substance Painter without losing resolution.

If you dont have the license, you can just get it for one month for 20 bucks and get 30 materials with that. Which is also a good oportunity to try out the Substance package because its an amazing software.

I dont know if this is widespread knowledge, but I never heard about it anywhere, so I decided to post it here.

  • Shawn Blanch(blanchsb) replied

    tomasplasil thanks for the tip. Yeah substance it quite familiar in the forum but I am glad to hear 'use cases' explained like this.


    I decided that I want to learn shading theory better in blender and got a few mask tools like bPainter and MaskTools add-ons. I'm still very novice compared to how substance does things but the node package in blender is extremely powerful as well. Jonathon's post during nodevember was impressive.

  • Tomas Plasil(tomasplasil) replied

    Its a bit of a niche tip maybe :D But it when I was looking for specific textures it helped me out a lot.

    It also (sometimes) has a lot of benefits to apply the displacement (or sculpt it) as geometry before texturing in Substance painter, as opposed to just adding the material in Substance painter, because when you later bake it, all that information will be in the curvature, AO and thickness mesh maps. Which gives you more flexibility when creating procedural masks.

    Another thing that can be sometimes useful when youre working in the Blender node editor is to quicky import the model to Substance Painter, bake mesh maps and then use the procedural features to create a custom mask. Then the mask can be exported and used in Blender as factor in a mix shader for example. That way you can tile textures in blender and use all the node features but also utilize the awesome procedural masks from substance. But maybe the same result can be done with the addons you mentioned, I didnt try those out yet :D