Hey Guillaume, thanks for taking your time for this interview. Can you tell us more about your experience with Substance on the game Ghost Recon: Wildlands?

We started thinking our texture pipeline four years ago when Substance Painter wasn’t available yet. We based our reflection around Substance technologies and how it could help us create the largest open world Ubisoft has ever brought to life. Since the previous game we made (Ghost Recon: Future Soldier), we were willing to use Substance in our pipeline and this new Ghost Recon iteration was the perfect use case for that. The amount of assets we had to create was so large that we couldn’t think of another way for handling this workload with our rather small art team.

For which assets/environments did you use the Substance toolset?

In Ghost Recon: Wildlands, the terrain is one of the main “characters”, and as such, needed a lot of care. I made a few Substance filters that our senior artist Yannick Signahode could use in Substance Player in order to create variations of assets he sculpted in ZBrush. With a few subsets of tools, he was able to generate multiple PBR texture sets based on the one he hand-crafted. As a result, he was able to quickly iterate and capitalize on his work and put more time and care into details during the sculpting part.

Three different categories of assets were also identified to really benefit from a Substance pipeline: characters, weapons and vehicles. Those assets are obviously another important part of the game so we needed to be able to iterate on them as much as possible, on all of them, during the entire production.