Final Major Project - Texturing books in Substance Painter

 Substance Designer

    When it comes to making a little more complicated, unique textures, I like making them in Substance Painter rather than in Substance Designer because Painter gives me a lot more freedom for things like drawing, for example, or importing and saving different things such as alphas and texture maps in my library in order to save and edit them later on. In Substance Designer, I often tend to just create base materials such as different types of metal, woods, fabrics and so on, and import them in my library in Substance Painter in order to also save and edit them later on.

        In this particular case, I used a combination of base materials in Substance Painter in order to create the bases and then build upon it. I wanted the books in my scene to give the viewer the impression that they're old, therefore I spend some time researching on the internet what book covers and letters looked like during different time periods - how were headlines being printed onto both hardbacks and paperbacks (I learned that most books during the Victorian Ages were hardbacks, which is something that I didn't know before), how were words being carved into them, what fonts they used, etc.

Development

    One of the very first things that I noticed was that no matter what colour the cover the books were, almost all of them had some sort of gold trims and golden words carved into them. Especially the ones that had been written and published during the Victorian Era, which is the time period that has been inspiring my project the most. 

    To emphasise that the books are quite old, I used a variation of different things - Grunge maps in order to add a little bit of noise and roughness to the fabric, Cloud maps in order to create the impression that there's dust on them, and Dirt maps in order to suggest that the pagers have been flipped through a numerous amount of times and because of that are a rough around the edges. 

 

Result

    In addition to that, I also noticed the fonts in most letters looks very fancy and handwritten. At first, I attempted to replicate that using the default brush in Substance Pinter, although it didn't exactly work.. so what I ended up doing instead was open Photoshop, find a text that was relevant to my theme on the internet, copy it and edit it in Photoshop as a caption to put onto the pages in my notebooks later on. From Photoshop, I exported the created text box as an alpha (by inverting the colours so that the background would be back and invisible and the text would be white and visible and creating a separate alpha channel), and imported it into my library in Substance Painter. From there, I just used the text box as a stamp onto the papers and created two different versions.

Ink 

    One of the last things that I did for this particular mod kit was create the texture for the feather for the little ink bottle that I have in my scene. To make it look more realistic, I turned the complicated shape into an alpha in Photoshop, exported it and imported it in Substance Designer. Then, I changed the mode to an Alpha Blending so that I could add an Opacity Channel and once the textures were finished, I just set them up in Unreal Engine.