Substance Designer

For the tutorial on Substance Designer, we learned how to bake textures. One of the most important steps starts from the very beginning, which is to right click on the mesh you want to create texture maps for, and hit "Bake Model Information".

The window has many options to it, including a tab that allows you to select what sort of baking you want to do. Get used to this window, as it's all you're going to see.

The first step was to make an ambient occlusion map, which tracks the bounce of lighting on a mesh. Unfortunately, my computer couldn't handle this awesome program at first.

Luckily, using the second ambient occlusion option, which utilizes a higher poly model to map from (essentially the same as baking in Maya).

The next type of baking is normal map baking, which creates a bump map for you to use based off of a higher poly model.

Next is a color map, which essentially adds in the painted textures of the higher poly model to the low poly. It can also divide the mesh based on material, polygroups, or just the mesh(es) itself.

Convert UV to SVG essentially divides the model's separate parts and color codes them.

 Curvature baking creates a file that defines the edges of a model. It can either be done per pixel or per vertex.

A height map creates the illusion of depth that a normal map cannot.

First, you will need to convert the heightmap to a normal map in the graph editor. Press space bar and select the option below:

Then, after entering the bump map color to the node as well, connect it to the normal map.

For the default material (found under materials), create a separate node using an output and, in the usage tab of the node's attributes, assign it as "height".

In order to see the full height, edit the default material and increase the height value.

Different games use different renders. In order to see what the maps will look like in other games, you can switch the rendering under the "renderer" tab. For height, similar values are at play in the material editor.

Opacity mask renders transparent elements in a texture map.

But in order to use it, you need to create an opacity node on the graph editor first.

 Position maps divide the mesh based on their positions from an axis.

You can either choose from a single axis (the below used only the z-axis)

Or all three axis.

The thickness map is the inversion of the ambient occlusion map. It searches for light bounce from within the mesh.

the lighter the color, the thicker the mesh is.

You can transfer a texture from one mesh to another that has a completely different UV map.

the two meshes and their textures compared

World Space normals calculate normals based on the space that they are in, instead of the mesh itself. It's best used on static objects in game engines.

There is also world space direction, which is the same as the above, except that it calculates based on a single direction, instead of the world surrounding the mesh.

And that is the wide-array of baking for Substance Designer.