Realistic Basketball Court - Texturing, Using Substance Painter

With completing the architecture of the basketball court I've decided to start texturing the assets I have and begin to build my scene in Unreal Engine. I know I'm most likely going to be modelling smaller prop assets later but I couldn't wait to start using Allegorithmic's - Substance Painter to see what the program is capable of and to hopefully work out what works and what doesn't with the models I already have.

My intention is to texture the whole environment using Substance Painter as it houses very useful tools such as being able to create dirt masks or quickly blend different material types, and all ready for PBR export. The program is new to me but it has been very intuitive to pick up and use. There are still some features such as the blending layers and adding generators to masks that seem to be temperamental in using, but overall I'm finding it very efficient for texturing and being able to paint unique textures straight onto the mesh is a method I wish I had implemented into my pipeline in previous years.

One of the benefits of being able to paint straight onto the mesh is how quickly you can fake details. In the image below I've managed to quickly give the impression of bolts in the supports by simply painting height information into the separate channels available. Also, painting straight onto the mesh allows you to see directly how details like damage are working with the mesh and the lighting, for example the subtle scratches on the edges would have taken some back and forth between Photoshop and 3dsMax to achieve, however I was able to replicate it in seconds with Substance, and UV seems are no longer an issue either with being able to paint over them.

Substance Painter has the ability to generate all kinds of useful maps which are used to calculate things such as dirt buildup overlays. However the results weren't always that good, with issues such as light bleeding from edges being a problem, so I decided to bake my own AO maps in 3dsMax to use in the program.

To begin texturing each asset I had planned the texture sheets and grouped the meshes accordingly, having a separate file for each group and working on one sheet at a time, I.e 'Metal' assets or 'Brick and Stone' assets, allowing for a clear layer tree with shared overlays for universal material properties.

One great thing about Substance Painter is that you can scale up or down the texture size at any point without loss, so I was working mostly with 4k materials to help see painted details and then scaling them down on export. Also For efficiency I combined the grey scale textures sheets where possible into the different channels.

One problem that arose later down the line in my plan of texturing the whole environment with Substance was; that whilst the scope for texture variation for each material was fantastic for creating the look of unique grunge and interesting areas of damage, the resolution of the textures were poor. For example in the images below, the brick featured underneath the plaster wasn't so noticeably low resolution in Unreal Engine, however because the UV's were confined to the 2048x2048 I allowed for this particular mesh the brick outside was the same pixel density and looked very noticeably low res with there being so much of it on display.

In an attempt to get some higher resolution bricks I rearranged how I've divided my texture budget up and allowed for one texture sheet of just the bricks walls.


However, as you can see it didn't do much good. It's obvious that i'm going to have to create a tiling brick texture for this. The reason I didn't take this route to begin with was that I thought I might be able to save myself some time, instead of needing to make decals to break up the large plains of bricks, I used Substance to paint graffiti and dirt over the mesh, with the wider intention of making the whole environment look unique and non uniform.

I realise now that I've been neglecting the traditional methods of texturing that I know work just fine, such as using tiling textures where possible. Substance Painter is fun to use but should only be used for texturing unique assets, not an entire building.