Hey! Being able to replicate something that exists in the real world is a skill that every texture artist requires.

Video introduction: ‭https://youtu.be/VMR1pJ3cAck

My name is Zak Boxall and I'm a texture and Look Development Artist in the Visual Effects industry. I’ll be showing you the steps I took to recreate this space capsule 1-1 based on photographic reference. We’ll dip into Mari, Substance Painter, Designer and Photoshop. But the goal here is to understand each step and not just follow along, we’ll go through the why’s and how’s, so by the end of this series, you’ll be able to apply these theories to your own models. It’s also worth noting, we won’t be using any third party plugins at any point.

For those of you that are already familiar with Mari and are used to working with layers, we’re going to be texturing exclusively in the node graph. I’ll show you how the node graph can allow you to work more efficiently and organised, in a procedural yet non destructive manner to get full coverage as a base. But we’ll hand paint details on each mask, to fully realize and match our reference.

With nearly 4 and a half hours of content we’ll go from beginning to end, grading the on-set photos, removing shadows & highlights, making tilables and building the colour map. We’ll then break the texturing into the various layers required for current physically based renderers. We’ll paint all channels in isolation, and work in different details into each map, to ultimately help define a surface that’s visually interesting, but matches our reference.

We’ll paint maps such as specular roughness, different levels of displacement and isolation masks for further control in look development.

We’ll also go through how to create multi layered procedural edge wear and dirt masks from scratch inside of Mari - Similar to smart masks you can get in Substance Painter.

The emphasis is on using these procedural techniques as a base, where we will then hand paint on top to art direct and paint hero moments, to help tell a story with your asset.

And finally all along the way, I’ll show you how I work non-destructively in anticipation for feedback expected in a production environment.