 Hey everybody, EJ here and recently I was asked to submit a piece of art for the Dell Precision 25th Anniversary VR Art Exhibition and it was a pretty awesome opportunity for me to start learning Substance Painter and that's exactly what I'm going to be sharing in this tutorial today is how I started using Substance Painter alongside Cinema 4D. So let's check it out. Through this Dell Art Gallery project, Substance Painter has become a valuable new tool in my school belt. I've been having a ton of fun using it. A lot of people say Substance is kind of like a 3D Photoshop and I totally get that analogy now. So let's begin by talking about how you have to prep your model in Cinema 4D to get it into Substance Painter so you can start adding materials to it. To export your model to Substance Painter, there is one important aspect of a Cinema 4D file that you'll need to understand how Substance Painter will kind of translate it. So you can see I have all of my objects here. They're all made editable and what I did was created a normal C4D material for each and every object that I want to be represented as a separate texture set inside of Substance Painter. So this means that for the tongue object, I want to make a specific tongue material inside of Substance and same thing with the body, I want to make a separate texture from say the head. And you can see that the ear texture is actually applied to both ears. So what this means is that even though I have two separate objects in Cinema 4D, the fact that I have the same material applied to both of these objects means that when we bring this into Substance Painter, we are going to be creating a single texture set or material for this ear texture that is going to be applied to both of these ears. So if you want to create a texture, a separate texture for the left ear and the right ear, it's going to be very important that we actually create two separate textures. So ear and like ear one, then I got to make sure I apply that ear one material to either one of the ears. And this will mean that I can then create a unique texture for the left ear and the right ear. Same thing goes for the eyebrows. If I just have this single material that is applied to both the eyebrows, I'm going to just be creating one single texture that's going to be shared by both of these objects. So you'll want to create a material for every different individual material that you want to generate inside of Substance. Again, it's not going to go by these objects. It's going to go by these materials and these materials and the names will be the thing that will be brought into Substance. So make sure that you name all your materials because your object names are not going to come through just the names of the materials. Now optionally, it's a good idea to go in and UV unwrap all of your objects as well. Now this is optional because you can utilize the Substance Painter auto UV that is actually really nice. But for my purposes, I went and just auto UV unwrapped inside of Cinema 4D. I'm going to go back to standard view and to export out your model, we're just going to go ahead, go to File, Export, FBX. There's really nothing you need to change here. The only important thing is that you need to make sure that the materials are going to come through because again, if I go back and open my Material Manager here, these are very important. These are the things that are going to be loaded up inside of Substance, which you'll see very shortly. So I'll just go to Export, FBX and this should be just fine. Hit OK and then just save out wherever and then you can import that FBX into Substance Painter. Instead of Substance, you'll load up your FBX file by going to File, New and you'll choose the template that you want. And for Redshift, Optane, you'll want to use this PBR Metallic Roughness and then you'll just select your file here. So here's where you'll select your FBX file that you exported. And here's where you can change the document resolution. So if you want to work at a higher resolution like 2K or 4K, you can change that here. I'll change this to 2K. And here is if you are working with UDIMs, you can use the UDIM workflow. And also if you have not manually unwrapped your models in Cinema 4D or another application, you can actually use Substance Auto Unwrapped feature, which is actually really, really powerful and really great for those of you who are not that great at UV unwrapping. I can't say I'm all that great, but I already did my unwrapping in Cinema 4D, so I'll leave this unchecked. And then we'll just hit OK. And here is our model. Now for navigation, we are going to be using the ALT key a lot. So if you hit the ALT key and click and drag with your left mouse button, that is your orbit. If you hold the ALT key down and you right click, that is your zoom, or you could also use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out. And then ALT, middle mouse click will be your pan, so you can adjust your view with using the ALT key and your left, right and middle mouse buttons. Now remember how I said that the material names and the materials that you make in C4D are the things that come through Substance Painter? Well, here in our Texture Set list, you can see all those materials and the material names are loaded up as a Texture Set list in Substance. And you can turn these on or off, like so. And then you can also paint on any layer directly in this layers area here. So just like in Photoshop, there is a default layer, and if you go over to your shelf area over here, you can load up a brush of your choosing. And then you can go down to the properties of the paintbrush and maybe choose your base color here, and you can start directly painting on that model. So if you have the headdress here, you can click on that and start painting on all of those different Texture Set lists here and start painting on their default layers. Substance Painter's real strengths is that it can utilize different aspects of your mesh, like Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, and Normals to help drive different texture effects like, say, grunge or rust. So to have Substance generate those maps, you're going to go and do that by going to Edit, Bake Mesh Maps, and here's where you can choose whatever different type of mesh maps that you want. I don't need the ID, but I need everything else, so we'll bake out the normal, world space normal, Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, Position, and Thickness, and you can also choose the output size. So what is that resolution? You can up that all the way to 8K. Just for demo sake, I'll keep that at 512, and I'll go and just bake selected textures. And you're going to see this is going to go through all of the different texture sets and bake out all of those different mesh maps. So with our mesh maps baked, you can utilize Substance Painter's real strength. It's Smart Materials, which you'll find right here. And a Smart Material is basically a procedural material that can utilize all the baked mesh maps, and you can even generate your own. And while you can generate your own Smart Materials, there are plenty of presets that you can utilize right off the bat here in this shelf area. So let's go ahead and let's try one of the gold armor, and we'll just apply it to the face. And you can see on our head object here, I can delete that default layer, and you'll see this folder. If I click the folder, just give this a little bit more space. You can see all of the different effects that are contributing to this kind of gold armor material. You can see a little bit of noise. If you click on this AO dirt, you can see here's our paint layer and here's the mask layer. So again, just like a Photoshop layer, you can also have your mask. You can click on the mask and see what's happening on that mask. You can see this like effect layer here. Let's see what's going on. So if we look down here, you can see all the way down here what effect here is doing. It's using the World Space Normal, and it's applying a custom grunge map here as well. So if you go in here, you can adjust the histogram position, the contrast, and you can see that's controlling that kind of like grunge noise that we have going on on that layer. We look at the surface details. You can see there is a cloud layer. If I turn that on and off, a cloud layer is basically a type of noise, and then just a little bit of Gaussian blur. So Gaussian blur effects, so you can apply Gaussian blur, all type of effects, just like you can in Photoshop, as almost adjustment layers or effect layers. If I go ahead and delete this gold armor, and I go over to this normal materials area, so we had smart materials. Here's our normal materials. You can see a lot of presets here as well. Now, the difference between smart materials and normal materials is if I drag and drop this gold pure onto our object, you can see it's a single layer. It's not a folder full of different layered effects. So a material is basically like your material node inside of Cinema 4D and Redshift and Octane, where you can choose your base color. You can choose the roughness level, the metalness, and you can even load up different types of noises to control, say, the roughness. So I can load up a Perlin noise, and you can see that's going to be driving the noise. So it's almost like we just plugged in a Maxon noise into the roughness to drive the roughness value here. And we can, of course, go down here, adjust the contrast of that noise. So if you're used to working with third-party renderers and building textures with nodes, this is a very similar type of approach. Let me just go ahead and undo that. Now, remember we baked out those mesh maps to create our own procedural material from scratch? So we have this gold layer. So let's choose something that contrasts the gold. Let's do this iron raw, and we'll place that just above this gold layer. So let's go ahead and create a mask. So I'm going to go right click and add black mask. And if I click on that mask layer, I can right click again and add a generator. Now a generator is a generative effect that you can apply to either your mask or a layer. Now you can see that our generator is empty. So if I click on this little rectangle here, I can load up all of these different type of generator effects. You can see we have dirt, we have curvature. Again, these are different type of effects that are going to be able to utilize all of those mesh maps that we used. So let's just go ahead and choose dripping rust. That should be pretty cool. And you can see exactly what's going on now. And you can see that that is also not only driving the mask on the base color on our diffuse layer, but it's also contributing to our bump channel or our height channel. So you can see with that dripping rust generator, you have the ability to adjust all of these different parameters here. And again, this is controlling the mask and revealing that iron layer on top of our gold layer here. So you can adjust the spreading, the drip intensity. And notice how these effects are being kind of isolated to the curvature areas, the top of our model using the position map. And all those mesh maps are really coming into play here. Now, if you didn't want this to affect, say, your bump layer or your height layer. So if I go to height, I can go over to this actual layer and just bring down the opacity of this layer and get less intensity on that bump map or that height map. I can go back to my base color and you can even adjust the base color of that iron. So a lot of flexibility to be able to go into each individual channel and basically use a bunch of Photoshop layers and effects to control your diffuse, your height, your roughness, metalness and your normal. Now, I can even click on this mask, right click and add a paint layer. And this is where I'll be able to go and use our brushes again. So if I want to add, say, some cracks here, we'll do some cracks and you can see I can paint directly on that mask and kind of grunge up. Let's get a different brush here. So I can paint on here and I'm actually painting black here. If I go down to the brush, go to grayscale and just crank this up to one. This will be the white color. So I'll actually be revealing that iron material here. So you can use both effects and paint directly on a mask to be able to create whatever type of material look that you want. In addition to all the smart materials and material presets you'll find in your shelf, you can access a massive library of even more assets by going to this icon here, which will launch the 3D assets in the Creative Cloud Marketplace. And you can see a bunch of really nice high quality materials here and importing them into substances is as easy as clicking the send to and substance painter. And you can see how that loaded up right there and we can apply directly to our model just like so in addition to the 3D Marketplace on the Creative Cloud desktop app. You can go over to the 3D community assets area, which is a collection of community led 3D assets that is continually updated and where you can search for the exact material that you're looking for as well. So let's go ahead and search for some sandstone, which would be great for the Sphinx. And here you can see some sandstone and some stylized sandstone as well. I'll click on that and see exactly what that looks like. I think that is perfect. So to go ahead and import this into substance, I'm going to download this SPSM file, head back into Painter and to load up that asset, I'm going to go to File, Import Resources and I'm going to click this Add Resource and I'll find where I downloaded that sandstone. You can see I downloaded a few of them here. Let's download this one here. So you'll see this is going to get imported as a smart material. So you have a few different options. You can have this loaded up just in your current session. So if you close out of Substance Painter, it's going to get removed from your shelf or you can have it just live in your project or you can have this stored in your library where you can access it over multiple projects. And I'm going to do just that so I can use it in any other project that I want to work on in the future. So I'll go to Import. And here you can see that sandstone smart material. It's in our smart material library here on our shelf. And I can just drag and drop this directly onto my model. And let me go ahead and delete all those other layers that we were working with. And you'll see just like the other smart material we checked out with that gold armor, we have a folder here. If we click on it, we can un-twirl and see exactly what is inside of this sandstone material. And you can see there's quite a bit of stuff going on. So if we click on some of these masks, we can explore and take apart what is actually going on here. And dissecting smart materials is a great way to understand how substance works and how you can start to develop your own smart materials as well. So if you look at the dark cavities, you can see that there is a blur effect and then a mask editor, which is basically just using a grunge texture for an input. And it's also using all of these different mesh maps to control this orange color being applied to that object. You can see that blur layer. A blur effect is just like a Gaussian blur effect in Photoshop or After Effects, where you can adjust the blur intensity. Let's go ahead and check out a few more of the layers here. So we have a scratch layer. By turn that on or off, you can see exactly what's going on there. And if I click on the mask and see what's driving that mask, you can see that there's this metal edgeware effect that is being applied to it. And you can see that it's using the ambient occlusion and curvature to drive this map, as well as world space and position. You can see all of the different type of parameters we have. So if you want to adjust the wear level, that's basically just controlling how prominent those scratches are. The contrast, you can see the generator that is being used, the metal edgeware. So again, that's just found by searching the generator area here. So let's search for metal edgeware. And you can see that's exactly what was loaded up here. And you can also adjust that scale as well. So smart materials in these generators are a very awesome feature inside of Substance. Very, very powerful. And again, the best way to learn about all the ways you can use all of these different type of effects is to go ahead and dissect all of the different smart materials here. And also on the community led substance page. So I'm just going to make a few tweaks to the colors here because I think this is a little bit too orange. So I'll just the base color, make it a little bit lighter. So remember, at any time, you can go into any material channel and adjust how these effects are affecting, say, your height channel. So if I go into the height channel and go down to this scratch layer, you can see that that is contributing to the bump channel. And I can even bring down the opacity there to maybe half that. And you can also use any type of blending mode just again, just like in Photoshop. And anything that you do here is purely just going to affect what this layer is doing in the materials height channel. So here you can see the final textured version of this pugs things. And I basically just took that sandstone smart material, made a bunch of adjustments. And then once I was happy with it, you can actually copy that same smart material to other layers so I can copy this layer, go to the body. Let's just delete this material that was just here. We can right click and paste those layers. You can see that we can just apply the same effect to different objects. And so I did the same thing, copy and pasting it to the ears, the eyebrows, this little headband area here. And one of the cool things is that in addition to copying, pasting materials, let's just say you wanted to create an instance of that face material. I can go to the head. I can right click and I can say copy layer, go to the body. I can right click and I can actually paste the layer as an instance. And what that means is that if I go back to the head and adjust anything here, it's also going to adjust that on the other instance material as well. So this is a great way to create one material, adjust it and have it be applied to multiple areas and automatically update. So just like working with instances in Cinema 4D, you can do the same thing, working with material instances in Substance Painter. Now let's add one last finishing touch. And basically what I want to do is on this little snake piece, I want to draw some little cartoony eyeballs. So to do that, I'm going to go ahead and click on the snake texture set list. I'm going to create a new paint layer. You're going to see that that's going to be loaded up. I'm going to double click on that layer. Type in eyes. And then basically what I want to do is just paint on the bump map or the height map. So what I'm going to do is go over to my shelf over here, load up just the basic hard brush. You can see how big that is. Let's make that just a little bit smaller. We can adjust the size either here or in the properties panel here. You can adjust the size, the flow, the opacity. All these different settings here, the hardness. And we can also paint symmetrically as well. And to activate symmetry, we're just going to click this button right here. You can see that line going down the center. And if I paint, you can see that I painted white, which is the color that's loaded on this brush. And you can see we painted a little bit of height, but I don't actually want to paint any color. I don't want to affect the diffuse or the base color. I only want to affect the bump or the height. So to do that, on this paint properties, you can actually choose which channels you are affecting with this paint brush. So I want to just affect the height. So I'm going to select that and solo that by holding all down and clicking on height. And here is where you can adjust the height level. So are you going to paint a positive bump or a negative bump? I actually want to paint a slight negative bump here. So if I click just once, you can see how we just made like an indent there. Now, if I make a positive bump, make the size a little bit smaller. And if I start painting, you can see I'm actually pushing this outward. And that's a little too sharp. So let me undo all of that. Let's go back to our brush properties. Let's bring the hardness way down and let's go back down to our height. Let's make it a little bit negative. Just the size here. That looks pretty good. I like big eyeballs. I'll make this just a slight bit bigger. And let's click a few times to make a nice little indent. Then we'll make a positive dent. Make the size a little bit smaller for the iris and there you go. Now, that's looking pretty rough for the most part. Let's go and let's add a blur effect to this. And how we can do that is by right clicking on this layer and going to filter. So a blur is a filter. Right now, there is no filter selected. And again, I just want this filter to affect the height. So I'm going to hold the all key down and activate the height. Go to filter and there is blur. And you can see how we can adjust the blur intensity here and make this just a little bit more subtle. And we can even go back into this layer and keep painting. And that blur effect is going to be doing its thing. Now, I would say that's looking pretty good. Another thing we can do is maybe this bump that I have on the chin here is a little bit too sharp. So I can go to the chin texture list here. And I can find this fill layer that has the lines on it. Right click and add a filter here as well. Again, so the height by holding Alt down or option and clicking and let's load up a blur here as well, adjust the intensity. You can see how that smoothed that out really, really nicely. So once you're done with your material, it's time to export out all of your textures so you can start using it inside of Cinema 4D or your app of choice. And to do that, we're going to go to File, Export Textures. And here's where you can choose where your export directory is going to be. You can choose the output template, the file type, the bit depth. You can adjust the resolution. So if you want to export out at 2K or 4K, you can do that here. And then as far as what you want to export, you can use custom output templates. So there's even a Redshift preset here that you can go ahead and load up as well. And that's going to export out and that's going to export out your color, your roughness, metalness, normal height, which is your bump in emission color. Actually, we don't have any emissions. So we can just delete that and we can go to the list of export that will be exporting out as well as the file names. You can see everything's looking pretty good right there. And then to load up that Redshift preset without the emissive, we can go back to settings, go to our output template and just choose that Redshift and we can see the list of exports. You can see the color, displacement, metalness, normal and roughness. That's exactly what we want. Now we can just go ahead and export those materials. Now we'll export all the materials for all of our texture sets, basically all of our objects. And now we can go ahead into Cinema 4D. Now we're back in our original Cinema 4D file with all of our objects and all of our default materials here. And we're going to replace all of these materials that are already applied to our objects with our Redshift material. Or if you wanted to use Octane, you can totally do that. But I'm going to change my renderer to Redshift and I'm going to go to material tools, convert and replace all materials. And this is going to exchange all of our materials, convert them to Redshift based materials. If I double click one of my materials here, you can see there is my Expresso node based Redshift material. Now at this point, all we got to do is go and find all of our materials and load them up. So here you can see here are the materials that are associated with the body. As you can see in the file name itself, I'm just going to select all these materials, drag and drop them into my shader graph. Click Yes. And then at this point, it's just connecting the right nodes to the right inputs. So here we have our body color. I'll go and import that into our diffuse color. See that update in our viewport. Then we have our normal, which we will need a bump map for. So bump map, the inputs, and then we'll choose tangent space normal because this is a normal map and we'll put this into our overall bump input. Now our roughness, we will plug into reflection roughness, displacement height field that will be needing a displacement node. We'll get our displacement here, texture map output directly to the output and into the displacement slot. In metalness, we really don't even need because there are no metallic properties to the actual head. So I can just totally go ahead and delete that. So I'll go ahead and close out of that. Let's go and fire up our redshift render view and let's see what our texture looks like here. So I'll hit play and let's add a light in here. So redshift light, dome light, just some nice even lighting there to see our material. And then to get the displacement working that is in our texture, we will need to navigate to the object that we have the material applied to. Right click, go to render tags, redshift object, geometry, click on override, tessellation and then enable displacement. You can see a little bit updated there, but you'll see that the displacement is now going to be activated on our object. So at this point, we're just going to go and do the same thing with all of these different textures and load up those substance material the same way we did with the body. So after replacing all of those materials and importing all of the substance materials, here is what we got. We got our hugs things with all of the substance material applied to it inside of Cinema 4D, using redshift and looking pretty awesome. Now, manually importing your textures from substance to Cinema 4D for redshift or octane is kind of a pain to having to plug in all those nodes yourself. So there is a plug in that you can purchase on Gumroad from this Lattles Lattles studio, OXA Lattles. Is that the little little C guy? But anyways, you can download this and it's fairly decently priced and this will actually just allow you to import everything automatically. And I think the time you'll save this is actually totally worth it. So definitely check this out. And you can see that it's compatible with a lot of different renderers and it's always updated. So it's always current. Really wish this functionality was built into substance, but at least there is this option here. So here you can see what I ultimately ended up with. And you can see I changed the color of the headdress and the headband, but I mostly stuck with the materials I created in substance. And then I just added the Pugsfinks into this nice sand desert landscape, which you can learn how to create in another tutorial I did. I'll be sure to link that in the description. But I sure am having a lot of fun using substance alongside Cinema 4D to get really nice custom stylized materials. And I can't wait to share more of my journey inside of Substance Painter. And I'm really excited to share all of the things that I learn along with you. Thank you so much for watching. Hope to see you in the next tutorial real soon. Bye bye.