#xandamonium

Over Simblreen last year something finally clicked for me about high poly baking!! (I felt very silly it took so long to figure out 💀)

(insert waluigi noise)

When I do my high poly detail sculpts I like to use the Multiresolution Modifier in Blender. This keeps everything light and non-destructible - and helps a lot if you don't already have a specific shape or silhouette in mind. (It also helps with computer processing power)

For full fits, when I already have a silhouette nailed down - I'll make a copy and go in with Multiresolution and sculpting tools to add in some fabric folds and larger details that would be annoying to add in in Substance Painter. After I'm happy with the sculpt, I apply the multires modifier and then both the Low Poly and High Poly get saved out as DAEs and work moves on in substance painter!

With Il Capitano's Outfit, it was so intricate and a lot of UVs overlapped so in order to have more control over the bake I separated it into about 10 pieces and baked it in Substance. There's a neat tutorial on how to do this here.

ignore the mess, I moved this into the done folder and a ton of high poly meshes got disconnected in the move

When I make a new CAS project in Substance (I have a perpetual license of Substance Painter 2024 on Steam) I'll work on a 2024x2024 map, because Substance hates anything that isn't a square. After I'm done I'll squish this down to the right size in Photoshop. There is a good amount of cleanup I have to do by hand when doing a bake this way. When I subdivide the model in Blender it's hard to keep all the edges of the garment 1:1 (the high poly usually shrinks a bit) so I'll export the generated maps from substance and do my best to clean up any rough edges in photoshop before re-importing them back in.

And then I start drawing the rest of the Owl basically. Using my baked in details as a base, and also sometimes cutting together pulled textures from EA - I go in and add stitching, fabric textures, buttons, etc. Substance 2024 also has a really great embroidery feature, that I used to make the embroidery and brocade effect on the new dress! Substance is really good at making hyperrealistic things - making something more Maxis Match is a lot harder imo. 😅 When it's time to export my maps, I set as much as I can to a grey tone (for easy recoloring) and use these export presets!

I'll also export the 2D Material view with Transparency to use as both a quick way to Mask in PS as well as added detail I can blend in.

From there my workflow moves to photoshop, where I bring in my maps from substance, size them correctly, set up my file with all my masks and gradient maps - and hand paint the extra details on top that really make it sparkle. (speaker example cause I'm not wading through that PSD again WOOF)

I like to build the bump, spec, and shadow maps all in the same file since my masks are already set up. If I need to swap alphas in and out I copy and paste it from channels onto a new layer!