Tell us about your role at The Mill.

Working for a VFX company like The Mill means I get to work on a variety of projects from week to week. As an artist here, it’s important to be equipped with a diverse skill set. For example, one day I could be creating a photo-real car, the next day I could be building a robot for a science fiction piece, and another day I could be making cute creatures for a mobile game.



Why did you choose to use Substance Designer/Substance Painter for the Kia ad?

As VFX artists, we end up using different tools all the time to achieve the highest quality look. The unique and attractive offering that Substance Painter provides is the ability to see a good material representation of what I’m working on in real time – especially when calibrating proper roughness values that involved more back-and-forth tweaking before using Substance Painter. Some of my look-dev artists who focus on the final shader and render have said that this has made the process a lot easier for them. I started to really see the value of the Substance toolset – especially Substance Painter – through the Allegorithmic tutorials.

Our Modeling and Texturing Supervisor at The Mill, Felix E. Urquiza, was fortunately very open to looking into this new tool, which gave me proper time to work with it. I started using Substance Painter and Substance Designer in my spare time which also helped me provide more examples of how we could use it. Kia ‘Hero’s Journey’ was one of the main projects at The Mill that saw a lot of use with Substance Painter.



Can you walk us through the texturing pipeline you developed for the boat?

With the Kia project, which was shot mostly on green screen, our responsibility was to create believable environments and creatures that would hold up the realism. Once we had previsualization, we started to model all of our assets provided by reference. The boat model took one week and it took three days to get the main texture in Substance Painter.