Building an Entire City with Substance – A Texturing Story with Mostafa Samir

Tell us more about your method to tackle this huge-scale project.

The layout and camera animation are the most important phases. I’ve tried and modified the actual environment a lot in these two phases in order to get the look that I wanted.

Secondly, in the asset creation process, I tried to create 360 assets in order to reuse them as I want through the project to save time. Also, I created a bunch of props to be attached to any of the buildings.

The assets are divided into categories:

• Buildings (Luxury for rich people, medium for the merchants, mall for the public).
• General props for the streets.
• Animated assets such as water, fabrics, and smoke elements.

Why did you decide to use Substance? Was it your first time using Substance Painter?

I was using Photoshop for texturing but this project is different than any other thing I did before. The texturing is very essential because If I didn’t get the realistic details the project would collapse entirely. So it was time to use the next-generation texturing software: Substance.

I’ve used Substance Painter once before when I wrote a “Substance Painter importer” for Maya. That tool helps artists import textures for multiple materials in Maya.

https://vimeo.com/182803723

I began using Substance Painter in a small test to see how things go. The test was the city’s old wall and I was stunned by the number of realistic details that I could get in a short amount of time. That encouraged me to continue with the project without fear of limitations.

Could you tell us more about your pipeline and how Substance integrated into it?

My pipeline starts with Blender. Then, I export the assets to Substance Painter and assemble everything in Clarisse for the look development and final rendering.

Actually, because of the large number of assets I have in the project, I decided to eliminate the time-consuming phases in the workflow to save as much time as possible. I began by writing a Blender script to export the finished assets into a folder structure that I made for the project to keep things organized. Afterward, I import the asset directly into Substance Painter. Also, I’ve created an export preset from Substance Painter to Clarisse iFX that matches Clarisse iFX material. Finally, I wrote a script in Clarisse iFX to generate the texture nodes with the color variety that I want. This script was based on the Isotropix script which assigns materials to multiple assets.

Can you give us a step-by-step breakdown of your material creation and texturing with Substance?

I’ve started the texturing process by creating the base materials for the city buildings. So I created Smart materials in order to reuse them all over the project. For instance, concrete, fabric, and gold.

Can you tell us more about the different masks and particles you used to achieve a sense of groundedness for your assets?

• Ambient occlusion for darkening some areas.
• Ground dirt to get the ground blending layer in the buildings.
• Particles (Organic spread, Leaks) for adding color variety.

What are the tips and tricks you can share with the community?

“Start now, get perfect later.” At the beginning of every project, you shouldn’t seek perfection; don’t look for perfection at the beginning or even the early stages. Just continue the work till you reach something good in the visual style, then you can improve what you’ve done.

Always use smart materials in order to save time.

How was your experience with Substance? How do you see the use of it evolve for your future projects?

Substance really pushed my frames to the next level and now I can’t work without it. Substance now is my main tool for texturing.

Lastly, I want to thank my friends who supported me since the beginning of the project:

• Mahmoud Salah: www.artstation.com/salah-cg
• Eslam Zidan: www.artstation.com/eslamzidan