Substance Painter

After reading that Digital Extremes, the creators of Warframe, use Substance Painter to texture their models I decided to try it out. Substance Painter allows you to paint directly onto 3D models while applying all of the textures that are used on the models in Warframe.

After opening up the program and selecting the model that I want to paint this is what the UI looked like. At first I found this very overwhelming as I didn't know what anything was at first but I messed around with some of the settings and quickly learned what each window had in it. On the left you can see the model and on the right you can see the texture, you are able to paint directly onto either of these and it will affect both.

The paint properties window was in my opinion the most useful window, it allowed you to change the colour of the brush, the height of the brush strokes (I later realised this is the Normal map), the roughness and how metallic the colour is. In this window it is also possible to change the brush shape or even use a stencil as the brush.

I noticed that there was a guide for the shaders that are used in the creation of textures so I followed their guide and put them into Substance Painter. This shader tries to emulate what the object will look like if it was in the game. I will show this later when I am creating the textures for my models in Substance Painter.

- Peter

Warframe. (2015). SUBSTANCE PAINTER SHADER. Available: https://warframe.com/steamworkshop/help/index.php?page=substance-painter-shader. Last accessed 17th Apr 2015.