Tanith Davies MA Games Art

Substance 3D Sampler

This week, I wanted to experiment using a new program - Substance 3D Sampler, and seeing if it can elevate my work. After reading an article by Yun Seong-Hyeon about the creation of ‘Armanz the Magnificent’, I was intrigued to experiment with creating the crane texture pattern on my character’s cloak using the embroidery setting in Substance 3D Sampler, to give it an elevated effect.

The tool was very intuitive and simple to use, and I didn’t need any further tutorials other than Seong-Hyeon’s Game Artist article. I started by using the shortened version of my design used on the orthographics to generate the texture creation.

(fig.1 - Early Stitch Iteration)

I played around a lot with all of the settings within Substance Sampler, including stitch length, direction, smoothness, thickness and fill types, until I found a result I felt both kept the detail in my design, and felt believable in terms of stitch direction and density (fig.1).

(fig.2 - Design With Distinct Colours)

However, the stitches of the different objects started to blend in with each other, due to the colours of the image I uploaded not being different for each asset (e.g. - the flowers had the same colour as the fans, cranes and branches). I took my original design (not shortened) and made each colour distinct (fig.2), even if they won’t be these colours in my final version. This lead

(fig.3 - Layered Stitches)

This new design clearly separated each asset, with clear stitch directions layering on top of each other for different objects within the design (fig.3). I made some final adjustments to the density and the fill once these new directions were in place. I found it difficult to create an effect I found was appealing for the dense stitching inside the cranes (fig.4), having experience in embroidery myself, when filling a dense area, the variety of stitch angles present in the pattern wouldn’t occur naturally, but reducing the direction of stitches, then resulted in losing detail elsewhere.

(fig.4 - Crane Stitches)

Substance 3D Sampler is fully implementable into Substance Painter, so I took time exposing the colour values (fig.5) so I could refine the colours further once my design fits into my greater character.

(fig.5 - Exposing Colour Values For Substance Painter Import)

I’m glad I’ve experimented with this softwear, as I ended up producing a very detailed response quickly and easily which definitely has the potential for elevating future work. Despite making the stitches as small as possible, they are still very thick for the scale the embroidery will be present on my character’s cloak, and so I do feel that a fabric print or applique would be more appropriate for the scale of the design. 

(fig. 6 - Outline Stitching Substance 3D Sampler)

In light of this, I changed the settings of the stitches from ‘outline and fill’, to just outline (fig.6), creating a detailed stitch pattern going around the edge of my blocked out design, to be used as an applique addition to my character. This result was less noisy then the previous iterations and more realistic for a large scale design.

References

Seong-Hyeon, Y. (2025) Armanz the Magnificent. Games Artist, 29 August. Available at: https://gamesartist.co.uk/armanz/ (Accessed: 6 August 2026). 

Unwrapping

Likewise, I progressed through the unwrapping fairly quickly, being experienced in this area when unwrapping within Maya, and wanting to spend most of my time dedicated to texturing and rendering.

I only had 2 instances of non-manafold topology (which I’m still slightly unsure how it came about), but exporting my meshes and re-importing them into my Maya scene resulted in a successful unwrap. 

(fig.1- resize of UVs after straightening reduced empty space

I made a consistent effort to straighten all of the UV shells to ensure less pixelation on texturing, straightening some of the individual faces as well, and occasionally just straightening the edges of the shell, and relaxing the UVs inside, since I felt the outside of the shell was the most important factor in texture pixelation.

Previously I had always relaxed the hand UVs into a starfish form, but on delayed research into the Fortnite character unwraps, I found the straighten their hand unwrap fingers all on the same axis for improved texture resolution, which I wanted to do for this character unwrap, as appears to be the industry standard.

I referred back to the initial list of materials I had allocated myself (fig.2), and grouped my UV shells accordingly. I started by grouping them in a default layout in Maya, but made slight size adjustments based on the visibility of the shell, and restacked more efficiently.

(fig.2 - Preproduction Deliverables)

(fig.3 - Final UV layouts)

My final UV layouts on various textures

Assinging materials to relevant parts

References

Retoping

The retoping process of my character was relatively quick compared to the sculpting process. I started by reverting my subtools to the lowest subdivision version to use as a base, or my low poly, which I then exported to Maya to work up from.

Regarding retoping by hand, I knew that the face and hands would certainly need custom topology to ensure the joints and face loops would deform correctly. I completed these first in Maya, using the quad draw tool identifying the loops first and filling in the rest afterwards.