On what recent projects have you been working on using Substance?

Lauren: Substance Painter was instrumental in creating the CG environments and assets for the Monster.com spot, namely the fully CG alleyway. More recently, I used it in the 2018 Cartier Ramadan campaign to help paint the color map on the CG leopard; this was used to drive the color of the animal's fur and bring some life to the skin texture.

Additionally, we used it to texture the CG desert city shown in the ad, using one scene for all the buildings. This was an incredibly tight turnaround; as you can imagine, painting an entire city can’t be done overnight. But I think we managed it an about 4 days!

This asset was later used as a basis for the matte painting projection, allowing us to create a lively bustling city in a fraction of the time.



How did Substance integrate into your workflow? How did it help you achieve better results?

Lauren: For Monster, Substance was integral in allowing me to visualize the alleyway and create a consistent and cohesive set of textures without jumping between too many scenes. I was able to load all of the buildings into the program, bake their maps and hand-paint all of the details that you'd see in a real-world alleyway using a combination of high-resolution textures, masks, and particle brushes. The same method applied to the city in Cartier. All I needed to do was organize the buildings into ‘city blocks’ in UDIM space before bringing them into Substance Painter. That way I could see how the whole city would look in Maya before I exported any textures.

Being able to accurately see how my diffuse, specular and normal maps were working together in a live scene, with real-time feedback, was incredibly useful. In particular, it allowed me to expedite my look development time, as I already had a rough idea of how to visualize the shaders that I would eventually make.