I started texturing early. I prefer to do this with all of my pieces alongside lighting and test renders, as it helps enormously when it comes to art direction. More often than not, the idea I have in my head for the final product is a fuzzy visual of lighting and the essence of the emotion I’m trying to convey through the piece. By blocking out lighting and texturing even before the models are finished, I ensure that I’m making the right decisions as I build out the scene. The quicker I can get half-baked ideas from my head to the model, the more fruitful my creative process is. This is where Substance Painter comes in! The smart material/smart mask system enables me to quickly establish basic textures on my objects so I can bring them back into Maya and see how everything is fitting together.

For the android head, I started with Substance’s Skin Face smart material. Having a base color, AO, SSS, and some micro height/roughness detail already established saves me the trouble and lets me get straight to adding character to the skin. After tweaking the smart material, my next step was to exaggerate the color regions of the face. This adds realism to the skin as it suggests different thicknesses of dermis/epidermis and also gives me a chance to add character and stylize the texture. I wanted this character to look vulnerable and sickly so I added paler areas along with saturated patches of red, blue tones, and a redder nose. Adding layers of brush strokes gives the piece a more stylized and painterly feel as well as helps to break up the uniformity that computer-generated noise and smart masks will create.

Next, I turn off the pore detail from the original smart material. I like to make my own pores with a combination of noise channels and the new skin scans that are shipped with Substance. It’s important that these layers are driving both height and roughness channels. On top of this, I add a fill layer driving roughness with a custom painted mask to make the face look more oily around the nose and forehead.