Substance Painter has a reputation as a tool for photorealistic PBR texturing – and this is accurate!
But Substance Painter can also be used for a wide range of other uses – think of it as a texturing toolbox with what you need to create any style.
In this tutorial, we’ll be using Substance Painter to create a traditional Japanese animation style.

The idea is to match with the traditional Japanese animation style. For this type of art the artists tried to match realism as much as possible with traditional painting techniques.
This project is an experiment to see what we can create without any pre-established workflows. I really want to show you what I have discovered through this experience.
We will see what can be done with the default Substance Painter package or the resources available on Substance Share and what I have to create with Substance Designer.
My references are clearly the work of 4C Studio and most specifically the job done on the movie Tekkon Kinkreethttp://www.studio4c.co.jp/works/en/pages/23.html .

• Reproduce the graphic 2D reference with 3D techniques;

• Keep the PBR Metal/Roughness shader and workflow, because this pipeline is compatible with all current rendering engine;

• Use UVs split by UDIM tiles in order to be in sync with the standard animation industry workflow;

• Use the Instancing feature to easily manage multiple texture sets;

• Create an Anchor point setup to save time and increase creativity.

About the scene and my modeling reference. The goal was to recreate this specific scene of the movie set in 3D.

To do this I relied on the sketch above found on this amazing Tekkon Kinkreet artbook

http://studio4c.ocnk.net/product/23

Because I didn't do any sculpting in this project, I chose not to use the Low and High poly definition workflow and work on a single Mesh with a Medium definition.

Tips and Tricks:

For the unwrap, I'll let you do it your way, but for the UV Layout I can give you some recommendations.

Arrange your Layout in a logical way and anticipate the Texture Set conversion, as it will inform the shaders you assign in the future. For example, if you have some parts with opacity, you need to change the default PBR shader for an opacity one, for instance the PBR Alpha Blending, in which case it is better to arrange all the elements that require opacity in the same Texture Set in order to optimize your project.

As the ground is a larger part of the mesh, I'm going to split it into four UDIMs. Thanks to the Instancing feature, I just need to work on a single Texture Set and Instantiate my group of layers across the other ground Texture Sets.

It is best to split the Ground in order to increase Texel density, which would permit to have a higher texture definition without going up to a huge map exporting resolution. Usually what I'm used to doing is the following:

With Maya: UV Editor > Edit > UV Toolkit > Transform > Tools > Texel Density

You can get and set your Texel density from this tool.

With this process I'm sure to have a decent Texel density everywhere. I only change my common Texel density for a few small but important elements such as eyes, labels, book pages, etc.

Four texture sets for one object is a good optimisation regarding texel density, but it's very complicated to manage in terms of texturing because now for one material (Ground material) I have to deal with several texture sets instead of one. Thanks to the Instancing feature I just have to work on a single Texture Set and Instantiate my group of layers across the others which means I can now work and modify only one texture set and instantly see the result without going back and forth.

All of these steps are necessary so as to break tiling repetitions.

Because I don't have a High Definition Mesh but only one object in Medium Definition I'll bake my mesh onto itself.

In order to use Painter's Generators I baked the following:

As I explained above this kind of materials with tiles will be done with Substance Designer. Tiles are a pattern repetition. Doing this with Painter would be painful.

Here’s a breakdown of the main steps, and bellow you can see the result on a primitive mesh with different intensity of concrete inside the joins.

Material created by Luc Chamerlat (Technical Artist at Allegorithmic)

For this project, I started from photorealistic Painter materials for only two things: concrete of the gutter and metal of the electric pole. Otherwise I started from scratch with Fill layers, used Substance Painter's procedural noises and reduced the high frequencies.
When I say reducing high frequencies, I'm talking about the action of removing very small details in your procedural maps. Basically when a 2D artist draws or paints something he can't and most of the time he doesn't want to reach a photorealistic level of detail. This is why you have to reduce the high frequencies of the default Painter content to make it more stylized.

Tips and Tricks: Reducing high frequencies

Blur filter will diffuse the small details (high frequencies) And Histogram Scan will clamp the blurry shape and redefine a new stylized shape without all the photorealistic details.

Most of the time this setup gave me good results. Don't forget that you can tweak every Procedural texture available in Substance Painter. Random Seed, Balance, Contrast and Noise Parameters allow you to create an infinite amount of variations. In your procedural shelf, the Thumbnails represent only one of the possible variations so be curious and tweak it, you might be surprised.

A few words about the mask structure:
The first one is a mask editor mainly driven by the Ambient Occlusion mesh map.
The second one is also a mask editor with AO but in this one I also used the position map in order to create a gradient. This gradient simulated the ground dirt on the object.
The third mask editor is dedicated to the edge wearing effect.
And to finish a smart mask which is a mask editor preset available in the Painter shelf and as you can see this preset was made for a concrete edges effect but in our case it’s a wonderful rust generator.

My Base Material created with Fill Layers is now done, and because it's only driven by procedural content such as Mask Generators and Procedural Maps I can now save my layer stack as a Smart Material and use it in another project. To create a Smart Material you have to put all your layers in a Group and then right click > Create smart material

Now for the specifics details such as the Rust leaks, I will add a hand-painted layer. As an artist, I want to paint my details where I want and not be influenced by an automatic generator. For hand painting, you can use:

In the end I add a Mask with a Grunge Dust Small Procedural Texture to simulate paper grain and irregularities.

Breakdown of the utility pole

For the leaks, nothing is better than the Physical paint tool. I started from a preset and then I changed some parameters such as SpawSpread, Friction, ParticleLife. NB: Thanks to the Brush Preview window you can previsualize your Brush in real-time when tweaking.

Fine Edge Detect Filter available on Substance Sharehttps://share.allegorithmic.com/libraries/118 made by Vincent Gault

Since all of my materials are fully procedural, I can use the Instancing feature and extend my texturing to another ground TextureSet.

For this type of material please have fun and work on a setup that you can keep in your personal Shelf by using a Smart Material creation. Our workflow is fully non-destructive, so play with it as much as possible. Save your custom layers setup, masks, brushes with a simple right click to create your own Presets and then your personal style.

Smart Material created by Luc Chamerlat (Technical Artist at Allegorithmic) Available here:https://gumroad.com/l/jLSFJ

Anchor what ??? It's basically a dynamic connection between two layers.

It's very simple, you should start by defining a "Source Layer or Mask" with something you want to use in another layer, as a mask or a procedural texture. And then right click and "add anchor point"

Now you have to define a "Receiver" Layer or Mask.

You can make your connection with a:

In my example, I'm going to use a source layer that I'll name "Source_Mask" From that layer, I'm sending my painting in two layers. The Blue one receives my painting without any post effects, it's basically a perfect duplication of my source mask. The White one just below receives my painting and a Filter called Matte Erode / Expand filter in order to extend my shape and then add outlines.

Matte Erode / Expand Filter available on Substance Sharehttps://share.allegorithmic.com/libraries/426 made by Bradford Smith

And now what we can do with that setup is paint a shape with a white outline by default. Without anchor point this thing is impossible to do.

And from that setup we can add another layer and simulate a 3D font effect for instance.

Because with paint effects you can split your painting, change the blending mode or the opacity and it's also a good way to create a kind of history stack. I'm used to working this, way: one paint effect for the large shapes, one for the medium and so on. The idea is to anticipate any changes you may introduce later on, which is possible thanks to Substance Painter and solid workflow practices .

NB: Lazy mouse is your best friend when it comes to better precision when drawing nice curves

Finally I managed to complete the project without any need for external resources. In conclusion I’ve learned that you can use the default content of Painter to achieve a stylized project the only things you have to do are:

That's it for Painter

About Designer a tutorial about stylization is coming soon !

Luc Chamerlat: Has created three Materials, Wood, Gound, Tiles and two custom stylized Grunges with Substance Designer.

Céline Dameron: Has made this wonderfull Cute Alpha Generator that you can use with the Stencil tool also made with Substance Designer.

Bradford Smith Author of the Matte Erode / Expand Filter available on Substance Sharehttps://share.allegorithmic.com/libraries/426

Vincent Gault Author of the Edge Detect Filter available on Substance Sharehttps://share.allegorithmic.com/libraries/118

Go to Substance share !https://share.allegorithmic.com/ there's some very good and usefull tools in there.