Weeks 7&8: Arnold Shaders and Texturing in Substance Painter

Week 7

In this week, we went through different shaders in Arnold for rendering in Maya. Initially, the PBR material setup was done. The most commonly used shader is the aiStandardSurface. Some other shaders are  aiAmbientOcclusion, aiWireframe, aiShadowMatte. I tried out various shaders and experimented with lighting and rendering it.

 

To create added texture, lighting and effects, Physically Based Render maps are used. 

• Albedo - Base colour, no shadows are visible  

• Roughness - Will determine how rough or smooth a surface is - Also will affect the sharpness / blurriness of reflections and highlights on the surface

• Height - This map allows us to create the illusion of height and depth within a texture  

• Normal - Gives the object the illusion of more detail, without the extra polygons 

• Ambient Occlusion - This is a grayscale map which contains lighting data 

Week 8

This week's lecture started with the use of Substance Painter to create textures. Before exporting a retopologized and UV unwrapped model from Maya to Substance Painter, we have to centre mesh, delete history, freeze transformations and clean-up mesh. When the model is ready for export, it has to be exported as '.obj' or '.fbx' files.

In Substance Painter, open a new “PBR - Metallic Roughness Alpha-blend (Starter_assets)” file and choose the model to be imported. Then 'Bake Mesh Maps' and proceed to paint the textures using the different brushes or by using smart objects. Once the textures are created, they can be exported into the Maya 'Textures' folder and used as texture maps for the model after adding an Arnold aiStandardSurface to it.

To further understand this process clearly, I watched a couple of tutorials and found this video below to be resourceful.