Substance Painter: Making a Zombie Worm

Substance Painter is very similar to 3D-Coat, in that it is essentially a three-dimensional version of Photoshop. Like photoshop, you can have multiple brushes and layers to work with. You can edit aspects of the brush (not limited to the size), like opacity, spacing, and the alignment of the alpha. Layers and brushes can be assigned different modes: color, roughness, height, and metal.

It's a very versatile program, and as it touches upon something I enjoy doing very much (texturing), I found it easy to use.

For the tutorial, you start out texturing the worm body. I started off playing with the brushes, and switching between just using colors and heightmaps. I decided that I wanted my worm to be infected with some sort of alien fungus or moss, thus the strange texture on the tip of its forehead.

I figured the fungal parasite would latch onto the head and spread from there

From there I used the projection tool to paint on three different "alien textures" I found online. The first I worked on was for the back and the belly.

Which were then complimented by the third texture I picked out for the body as a whole.

Next was the eyes, which, after using a sickly yellow fill layer, painted.

veins were added in by disabling everything but the height map in the basic brush

the left eye is far more affected by the fungus. For the pupil, I put in a  white metal material to make it look as if the worm lost sight

the grisly eyes

In the tutorial, the instructor used vertex selection to create the pupils and paint them in. I didn't do that, as I felt that an uneven iris might actually add to the sense of something being wrong with the worm.

The teeth were a different matter. After putting in a yellow-ish fill layer, I added in another fill layer, this time brown. In order to simulate some rot/grunginess, I implemented a mask layer, and attached a generator to the mask. The generator I chose was the dirt generator, which created spotty effects on the mask that let the rot come in in blotches.

Then came the platform that the worm stood on. I essentially did the same thing for it that I did for the teeth.

A metal base

With a painted metal material accompanied by another mask layer placed on top

Which was all completed with another rust layer that had a generator mask attached

The same things were done for the grates and the bolts to complete the look.

One of the coolest features for Substance Painter came near the end, which is the particle painter. It literally uses particles to simulate different effects, such as water creating rust, fractures, or lightning.

For this project, I implemented a combination of the organic growth and fracture particle effects.

When you're done, you can export the settings and get your texture sets.

beautiful.

And its done!