Texturing

After creating UV’s, it was time to start baking. I baked everything (Aimpoint Micro, Iron Sights, Glass) except for the SIG MPX inside of Marmoset Toolbag 3. I had to use Substance Painter’s baker when I encountered some problems with the cage that MT3 generated for me on the part of the upper receiver that has diagonally cut holes for ventilation. I would have preferred to bake the entire project in MT3, because you have a lot of control over individual cages that are generated within the program, and it is a fast baker.

I approached the texturing on the SIG MPX much like I do with my other projects: one piece of the model at a time. I try to stay as organized as possible when working in Substance Painter, because it is easy to pile on the layers and get lost in your own project, just experimenting and seeing what might look good on the model. I usually start by creating folders for each part of the model. For example, I have folders for the upper receiver, lower receiver, magazine, pistol grip, etc. Since I seperate everything out into different folders, my layer stack becomes very large, but as long as everything is labeled properly it is easy to find something if I need to go back.

Most of the SIG MPX is a metal material that I created inside of Substance Painter, and turned it into a Smart Material so that I could use it later in the project. This smart material consists of three layers of different procedural noises, and varying roughness values to create what is supposed to look like a gritty/bumpy black metal that is seen on a lot of guns.

The plastic that appears on the magazine of the SIG MPX is supposed to be a polymer that is also commonly seen in guns . It has a bit of procedural white noise in the height channel, to give it a “bumpy” look, and the roughness was adjusted so that it wasn’t too shiny.

For the pistol grip and stock materials, I started with a base color that was close to a dark gray. After that I created three roughness layers in which I used a procedural noise in the roughness channel. Each layer’s roughness channels “opacity” in the layer stack was adjusted so that the material had a nice blend of scratches, and wear and tear, but most importantly, it looked like the weapon had been handled.

The approach that I took to creating the rubber material is usually how I go about creating a material inside of Substance Painter. I just start throwing procedurals in different channels, lower opacities, and find something that gives me a good result.

For the logos and all of the text on the gun, Ethan recommended that we create decal sheets in Photoshop. I obtained various logos and text by either Googling for logos or images, tracing and remaking logos, and retyping text with a font that looked similar to that which is on the real weapon. All of this was done on a few square images (2048×2048) with black backgrounds, and imported in to Substance Painter as alphas. Once imported, I was able to use the stencil tool to paint various text and logos onto the SIG MPX. On any text that had height information, I added a blur filter to the layer so that the text didn’t look like it was stamped so harshly into the material.