Texture painting Blender monster

The retopo and uv-unwrapping for the sculpting of my little monster in Blender is done, now I will texturepaint it in Blender.
Before I do this I import it into Substance painter to do 3 things:

a) Bake the curvature map
b) Bake the normal map
c) Add the basic skin

Substacne painter, now in version 1.4, has this great feature for baking textures. You can do this also in with XNormal or Blender but in my opinion, the quality of the baked textures in substance painter is awesome, so I use this tool. I also have the ability to add a base skin to my model with automatic curvature, which I will show you in the following steps.

Use the bakers in Substance Painter

Open a new project in Substance painter and import your low poly model:

This is the model I exported from Blender as obj. In substance it looks like this, without normal map:

So let’s create a normal map with substance painter, and also an ambient occlusion and curvature map – click on Bake textures button, select Normal, Ambient Occlusion and Curvature and finally add your highpoly mesh in the High definiton Meshes:

And here it is, feels like heaven:

I am using substance painter also for creating my main skin with a nice curvature. For this purpose I add a fill layer with the color I like to use for the base material, for the monster I choose a kind of green / brown mixture:

After that I add another fill layer and assign a new black mask for it. This is the color I like to use for curvature / dirt. When I added the black mask, everything of the new fill layer is masked out. Then I add an effect – a generator. Because I like to add dirt I choose the MG Dirt generator:

And this is the result for the base skin:

I right click this view and choose export all channels to export the images. After that I use these as diffuse- and normal textures in my Blender project. The model I use in Blender is the one I exported as obj and used in substance painter, and the material I defined for it uses the textures I exported with substance painter:

To paint the eyes (and claws) I switch to texture paint and use the TexDraw brush to paint the colors in. Before I can do this I have to add paint slots, one for diffuse color and one for normals:

Now I select the first paint slot and add white, blue and black points in different sizes to the eyes:

But you can see, that the dirt effect of substance painter has also influenced the eye’s area. This bump effect appears, because substance painter paints onto the normal map when applying effects.  To correct this, we have to flatten the normal map at these areas. Easy with Blender.

Select the paint slot of the normal map and use the Smear brush to flatten out the bumps for the eyes:

The blue color is a bit too simple, so I add an alpha to paint with, choose a turquise like color and paint the iris of the eye with one click (Alphas can be downloaded from the ZBrush alpha library):

Then I add a simple black dot and I am done:

There are more complex methods to paint eyeballs but for our model which is a cartoonish one, this method is really okay.

Currently I develop a game with Unity3D so for me it’s of major importance that the model works greatly together with that engine – so let’s import to Unity 5 and use Unity Standard Shader:

Awsome – you can play a little bit with the albedo colors like that:

And now my model is waiting for me to rig it… coming soon.