As we were adding new details to Blaze's model, we discovered the micro detail materials in Substance Source and felt compelled to try them. We didn’t want to wait until the next character, so we decided to remake all of Blaze's textures using the new technique. We're impulsive like that 😁
We spent many credits purchasing the vast majority of skins offered at Substance Source. They are made by texturing.xyz using their scan data micro details, so it seemed to us that the quality would be super professional.
At first, we were a bit disappointed because the material was tiling on a huge scale, and it was impossible to get any good results, even after maxing out the tiling 😱
We went insane googling for a solution. We thought there was a problem with the scale of our UVs (the "texels" and technical stuff like that), but no, our UVs were fine.
We asked in the Allegorithmic Discord server, where they pointed out that we had to disable the Height Channel and enable the Normal Channel. This solved our problem, and we could finally start texturing!
We had to redo Blaze's UVs to optimize the UV space as much as possible, so we could work with the skin materials without tiling them to the max and still get better resolution at 4K.
The effort was worth it. It took only one day of work to texture the whole body and face (we worked quickly and didn’t add too many details, but we're sure that if we dedicate more time, we can achieve much better results).
Blaze was beautiful with the textures we did before (using the 3D.sk photos), but now we think she looks more realistic, and her skin has a lot more definition. If we want, we can revisit the Substance file and add more details, making it easy to keep the characters updated to our latest self-imposed standard.
What we’ve learned from this experience is that texturing directly in Substance is much faster, gives us more flexibility, true albedo, and much better results.
We didn’t spend too much time adding details, but the new textures still show more resolution and level of detail. In our opinion, the Substance texture looks more realistic than the one from the photos, so we think it was worth the effort 👍
