Easy Crystals in Substance Painter

1. Intro: Hey guys, if you want to learn how to create these amazing, amazing looking crystals. And you want to learn how to go from very beginning to the very end. That means sculpting the rocks. Actually read apologizing drugs than you being drugs properly. And then painting in substance painter or shall I say, texturing them, then you're in the right place. And this course will set you up for probably years to come. Because after this you'll have a good knowledge of how to create a rock mesh or shall I say a crystal mesh. And you will have ready at your disposal all the project files, including a lot of presets for the actual crystals we are going to be creating. And afterwards, it's a, such a straight forward process when you finish it, because you will be able to just drag and drop a preset onto the, onto your rock mesh or crystal mesh. And you will have instantly our real cool crystal model that you can use in any senior lake. And you can repeat this process and literally print out crystal shapes and Crystal textures as you go. So if you're looking for something similar to this, just hop right in and have a wonderful time because this is really good course for you. 2. 1 ZBrush Rock Sculpting: So here we are in ZBrush and before we do anything really, lets just grab our brush tool. We're looking for a trim tool here. And we'll go trim smooth border. You probably guessed it already, but it's a pretty, pretty handy tool. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna get and grab ourselves a sweeter and make poly mesh 3D and just drag it out like this. And from this point we'll go into real plus three. We'll press T and go into the Edit mode. And we have ourselves a sphere here. Now, before I really do anything, I want to go to geometry and DynaMesh. And let's set this to maybe 150. And DynaMesh. Maybe that's too low. 200, 200, let's see. 24. Let's do 24 might be good. So let's just DynaMesh it again and let's see. So it's not giving us any extra details. So let's, let's first try and get some shape going on. So what I'm looking for in a shape is basically sort of a double triangle, so to say. So when I get it, you'll understand more. So I'm going to grab the Move tool and let's just scale this up a little. What I'm looking for is a shape that is going to have to extrusions like this. And probably it's going to have the top one a bit longer and bigger than the bottom one, like I did here. And we're going to of course make the sides and everything. But for this, this is pretty okay. So we're just going to have to go around it and sort of expand the sides. Let's just grab this and this. And for starters, I think this is okay. Now we can DynaMesh it and get more police. But for starters, I think this is okay. And how I generally make sides, because we have a sphere here and we want some sites to the actual rock is almost always use h bullish because it's a pretty subtle tool and get some sides going pretty quickly as you can see. So what we will do here as logistic grab it and let's just get some sides going. I think this is a bit too much. So let's just lower down the intensity. Something like this. It's a very nice and subtle tool for creating stuff like this. And just make sure you get the the edges correct. We want the top one to be sort of sharp. Something like this. Yeah. Let's just undo that real quick. I don't like that. So let's grab it here. So this is just a little literal base, base sculpt lake. We will add onto this much, much more. And let's get the size that are down here as well. So let's just get some shapes going. And we can always edit these shapes with Move tool and whatnot. So just just do something rough. For starters. I'm yeah, I'm pretty fond of this four-stars, so let's just use our Move tool to make things slightly better. So something like this, something like this should do. We have some inconsistent to use that I don't really like. So I'm just going to move stuff in place pretty much. Just make the shape look. Okay. I don't have any anything popping out, to be honest. That's what I don't like here. So I'd say so far, so good, but I don't like is this little edge here. So let's just try and make something out of it. You can really feel how this brush can be really suddenly used to create some nice shapes. You can just suddenly go around it and create these, these nice looking shapes. And that's what I like so much about it because it's really subtle. And you can create such a cool natural looking, especially for stylized stuff. Because what we're doing today is sort of stylized. Um, it's a really, really good tool to get those kinda natural flow of the whole rock. So let just put that in place and let's just create some more interesting shapes. Now, if you're a complete beginner, I really suggest you putting the intensity down. Because if I put this intensity to 100, it can mess up the measure really easily. And I just like using low-intensity a lot because it's, it gives me room for error. It really does give you a lot of room for error. Helps you get, get along with the program better. So for now, I'm liking this quite a bit. So let's switch to our Trim smooth border. And what they do is pretty much press B and then trim, D for trim and B for border. And that's how I select the brush. And I, again keep the Alpha off because if we have a square alpha, it's a bit, it gets it. You can mess up the mesh a little bit. So I like this one better. And again, I'm going to lower the intensity quite some bit. So let's just get trimming pretty much so. We want to create some interesting looking shapes here. And H pollution trimmed brushes are really similar. Just the H bullish has trimmed Barrage is a bit more harsh. And that way it can get these rocky shapes way better. In my opinion. See, we're getting some pretty interesting rock shapes already. Don't worry about the detail. Now, what we're after right now is just the base, the base look of the whole crystal rock we're trying to create here. So just don't worry about some details and errors. Try to get the big part to look well, to look decent and will always add, you can always add detail later detail is just left for the last bits. So just go round, create these interesting looking shapes all over and just make sure to just be free lake. Just get what you like from this rock. And what I usually do is just go around like this and create some nice and harder edges. And then basically just create these interesting looking, interesting looking edges and shapes and sides with the trim smooth. And afterwards I just add some detail with the Orbs brushes because I think those are one of the best free brushes out there. So for now, we're pretty much yeah, we are doing this pretty good. So as you can see, our rock is starting to take some shape. So of course it's nowhere near done, but slowly and surely we'll get there. And basically just go around sculpting and creating. Also remember you can always press left Alt and fill in these holes and even create some shape using left holds. You can always try out and test that as well. But for me, I like doing just does not, just taking away from the shape. Kinda gets me nice results and I'm pretty used to it. Also. There, there's probably going to be a lot of people better than meaning-making rocks. But yeah, just here, the textures can play the bigger role than the rock itself. So let's just get everything going. I want a little bit of a bigger detail now because I think I've been focusing too much on some small stuff. So something like this. Yeah, this is working quite fine. Now. Just, just let loose and be free with the shapes. You can always create more and undo what you don't like. So that's how I go about this. So yeah, I don't like the feel of that. So let's just undo a bunch of times. Something like this might be better. Yeah. So far we're getting a pretty decent shape going on here. And I'm pretty fond of it because we don't need anything too complicated, but we don't need anything really too simple as well. So you need to be careful when creating that kind of stuff. So we're just looking for something simple, but not simple, not really. Not way too simple. So something like this with a little bit of detail really works well in our favor. So let's just see. I think this is pretty good. I just wanna do a little bit of move tool to move everything a little bit better in place. Just going to extrude that this way, through this, that way. This a little bigger, this a little bigger. Make this kinda pop inwards a little. Well, this is looking quite good. Let's say, let's just remove this little bit here. Somehow. Just going to add detail around it. And what you really don't want to do is leave these marks from the brush because that makes it a little bit way too obvious what you did. So you don't want to do that. You want to make it look natural. And you can always, if you want, you can always use something like clay tubes to add a little bit of detail and then just trim it a little bit as you can see. But I don't like that approach that much. I would rather make this look a bit more natural with H bullish. By doing something like this, very subtle H bullish does the work really, really nicely. And since I'm liking the shape quite a bit, just going to add some more detail here and there. So something like this adds quite, quite a bit of nice detailing to the whole thing. I like this. I just want to move the down part a little. Something like this and something like this. Maybe. This looks better. It looks way, way better. Let's just bring the trim smooth again. I'll just kinda smooth this out and creates a bit more of a flat end on this side because it was a little bit too thin. In my opinion. This side here. So something like this. I see it working way better. Let's just use the move tool again and try and space this. And a little bit better. Something like that. And just trim smooth. Trimmed borders. Sorry. Not that big though. Yeah, this is this is looking quite nice. And we can already pretty much go in and do well in substance painter with this model already. But I think I'm going to just add a little bit of detail with the Orbs brushes. Just a tiny bit to make it more rock looking even though we were making a crystal, but I still really like this. This will fit really nicely. So let's just get some, get some of the actual orbit brushes inside. And I have them on my second screen here. And I liked the rock detail and rock noise. And we'll just import them in rock detail. Well, it's pretty self-explanatory. It gives that nice rocky detail to the whole sculpt. And just do some subtle detailing. So you don't want this to be too hard and too noticeable because then it ruins the whole feel of the shape we have going on here. Just a little bit of it does. That's quite a good job as you can see. And I would say this is there's a pretty good, pretty good rock. We can go along with this. Just maybe a little bit here. That's pretty good. Maybe just a little bit of a lower intensity as well. Yeah. That's that's looking pretty good. And if you ever feel like there is a little bit too much detail on one place, like maybe e.g. here, I just use H polish and lower the intensity quite a bit and just delete that detail or making more subtle. As you can see, that's how I would do it and that's how I usually do it. Just make makes the detail a little more subtle. And overall makes it look better. So I think we're pretty much done with this. All that is left is a little bit of decimating this. So pretty much read topo. And what we wanna do is export the high poly and then export the low poly. So let me just do that real quick. And basically what we go, I have a folder for this. You place it wherever you like. And I'm going to place it, I'm gonna make a crystal folder here. And just say Tutorial, Crystal. I'm going to place it in here and say Crystal, tutorial and underscore high because we want to know, we want to know that it's high poly. And basically we do that. Let's just save this. Okay? And we have the high poly version. And now what I will do here is actually saved the file. This is completely optional, but I like doing this because you have, you want to save the file where there is actually a high-quality version. So you can edit it rather than a low poly version because sometimes the undo history doesn't get saved and whatnot. So basically just, this is what I do. You don't have to do it. I just like to sometimes go back and iterate some stuff a little bit. And if you don't wanna do that, that's completely fine. So I'm just gonna do a crystal tutorial and I'm going to save this real quick. And let's go and into Z remeasure and press on the Z remeasure. Just with the default settings, target polygons count is five, so just, just pressing it is the default settings. And let's see what we get from it. So five k, even though we can really go lower on a mesh like this, I want to keep some good detail on it. So I will sell for five K Pauli's. Click on Export and Crystal tutorial just we want to set this to low. Save and press. Okay. And we have the file exported. Now, you can skip the next step. You can bump these models straight into Substance Painter. But I like, I like to just iterate the models a little bit in Blender or any other editing software you want. And then put them inside the substance painter. It's up to you. You can put these right away. It will auto unwrapped low poly model as well. So if you want to, you can do that as well. But for me, the next episode is going to be a little bit about Blender iterations and whatnot. So basically we are done with ZBrush and see you in the next one. 3. 2 Fine Tuning In Blender: So here we are in Blender and let's bring in our meshes. So import FBX, and let's go ahead and find our meshes here. So just select both of them and import them as FBX. So we'll just, you can select these. And before we do anything because they're really, really small, but just go to their sizes and let's do times 100 and other times 100 times hundred. So this must be the low poly. So let's do Crystal tutorial. Low. Let's just call it that way. And again like this times 100 times 100, and again times 100. There we go. And now if we hide this, this is our high poly. And let's just call it crystal tutorial high. And now what we wanna do is we have both of them. We can export them, but we need some nice uv maps for this. And we can leave, you can leave this to Substance Painter to auto unwrap your mesh. And it does really good job. You can leave it to Blender as well to autocrine or to unwrap your mesh. Or you can do it manually here in Blender by selecting the seams and whatnot. But I, myself really like using 3D codes. 3d codes is I think the best that UV unwrapping. And it gives you an auto unwrap tool. And it gets a really good shape right away. So I want to export this as an FBX and go back to our folder here. And I'm going to say blender. And let's say Crystal tutorial low selected objects and make sure you have selected the objects you want to export and export FBX. And while we're at it, we're going to export our FBX for this as well. And let's do high. And select the object. Make sure you have it selected export FBX. And we will now head over to 3D codes to correctly unwrap the whole thing and make everything look good. And then we're gonna go back to Blender and just modify a few things real quick. And then we're going to head off to substance painter real quick and finish off this whole thing. So see you in 3D code. 4. 3 Unwrapping in 3D Coat: So here we are in 3D code. And now let me just mention this is completely optional. You can use any other tool you like. I just think 3D code has the best tool for UV. So I'm going to do a UV map mesh and just select crystal low. And we're gonna go to UV set smoothing. I usually kill a select smooth but keep corners. It usually doesn't matter that much to be honest. Presented with our UV unwrap here. And it is pretty, pretty good. But we need some modifications. We don't want this to happen. And just select mark seams. And now if you left-click, I'll show you real quick. So if I left-click these two, it will create a new UV island there. But if I Control and click, I will delete the seam. And that makes it so it joins the bigger seam here. So let's just find another one here and Control and click. We just have those there. And I don't want this as a separate island itself, so let's just let it be eaten by something big. And I think we are done here. We want to click on Wrap again. And let's see, we have four nice sides. We have four, oh, we don't have this one. So let's just delete this seam. Or actually, I think deleting this one might be more beneficiary. No, no, no. We're going to delete this scene. And we're gonna go closer here. And we're going to mark these and delete this. So we have a smooth transition there. Or let's actually, let's actually ditch that. Sorry. I'm going to ditch. I wanted to have those as separate, but what I am going to do is I am going to make the seams here because I don't want those sharp, sharp corners there. So let's just do the same here. We want to keep it. And I'm just going to fix this a little nuts right-click or Control left. And another thing, I don't like these, I usually, I usually fix them. You'll find a lot of these throughout the whole mesh and you can, you can fix them around. But they're pretty the UVs right now are pretty **** good, I would say. So. Let's hit unwrap again. And we have two islands here and we have four big islands. That's exactly what we want. We want to pack it back UV it packs or UV nicely. So we already packed it. I don't know why I did it twice. And then what I like doing is I like to do auto scale. So it scales everything nicely. And let's maybe PACU V2, we can try that as well. So this is up to personal preference really. But I think now let's just auto scale. I think this is the best one we have. I'll keep this one and now apply UV set and press. Okay. And what we're gonna do now is File Export Objects and textures. And we want to output it to our tutorial crystal here. And let's just create a new folder back here for 3D codes. This of course optional. You want, you can do whatever you like. I like the FBX here. And in the 3D codes, I'm gonna do Crystal tutorial, UV and save and export. And now we're going to have real quickly to Blender. Just, just another thing out and we get to the fun stuff. Trust me, trust me on this one is going to be completely worth it. 5. 4 Quick Blender Changes: So we're back here in Blender and let me just get our file and import FBX 3D code and the UV B1. And you see this one is quite bigger. But you will notice something. This is a 201. This is 201 as well. So there's, well, this is 201 m and this is 2.01. So what we really need to do is just divide this by 100. And we will have the right, the right size of everything. Because the size here really needs to match with the high poly. Because if it doesn't, we don't get a good bake. And what we wanna do here, as this is going to be, let's just add another underscore old, and let's set this one as the main one. And we will export this right away. Fbx, export it as our blender. Actual here. I like doing this. You can do, you can do other stuff as well. You can name it to other other things, but I usually just wipe the whole thing and just upload it as this one. So let's just export FBX and it should be exploited quite quickly. And while we're at it, let's just do quick little Save As, and we want to save this as crystal tutorial. You can save it as much as whatever you like. Just it's usually good to keep a good habit of actually saving your projects, rather than just saving your, saving only your, your objects from within the project. So same. So let's kinda the fun parts right away. And let's fire up our Substance Painter right now. 6. 5 Texturing In Substance Painter: So here we are finally in substance painter. Let's close this popup and let's press File New. And let's select our stuff. So we want Crystal tutorial and low, low poly object and we want to bring in it right away. And it looks pretty good. And your layout might look a little bit different. I have 3D only, you probably have 3D 2D. I like the 3D only more. You can choose whatever you like to be honest. So let's delete this layer and let's go right away to baking. I'm going to bake mesh maps at four K. And what I'm going to use here is a high model. You can mess around with some of these, but I usually keep them all default. But if you want a really, really good and really good bake anti-aliasing and go here and do some sampling eight by eight. It makes an amazing, like a really, really good, really good bake. But I'm not gonna do it because it takes way longer. And the results without it are pretty good. It's just that they are a tiny bit better. So if you're going to use this for something really, for an object that really needs to be high-quality in a scene or wherever used, anti-aliasing. I'm not gonna do it because it will take too long. So let's just bake them. And let's just move this out of the way so you can see all the normals, everything sort of getting baked onto the mesh. And we have this low poly mesh with high poly with high poly detail, which is what we are actually looking for in the first place. So just let it get all the maps in. We probably didn't need all the maps, but I still like baking all of them. You never know what you will need later on. So let's press Okay, and let's look around. We have quite a nice looking model here. So I already have a preset here, and you will be able to download the preset as well. But I'm just going to drag it onto the mesh. And I'm going to explain a little worse. Each and everything does. So I'm just going to search for Crystal. And I have a bunch of presets here. I'll, I'll get some of them to you. Basically, this is the same exact preset just with different colors and some of, some of the settings tweaks. One, you can create even more presets than I have here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to choose probably this one. This one is a bispecific and I liked the green to it. And you will see that it doesn't look anything like I showed you. So what we need is go to the texture settings and scroll up a little. And under the channels, click on the plus and we need the actual emissive for this to work. So you can see this now looks like a nice little crystal and let me go out and explain everything to you. So we have the base color and the base color should always be kept the dark. It's a triplet, triplet or projection. Usually just better results with it. But keep it dark because let me show you if we get something really bright, It's really ruins the whole field. So the darker it goes, the more prevalent these other colors will be. But you can always create this glowy feel from it, from within it. So you can create a blue glowy feel. You can even create something like this for a glowy feel, even a red one if you want. The purple one usually fits almost everything. Really dark purple and somehow fits the whole theme of it. And as you can see, we have a pretty nice model here. We have scratches here, which is pretty simple. It's just a mask editor with some settings. Not really tweak that much, but we have a grunge mapping here with a little bit of balance and contrast. What's your leg doing usually, sometimes I even turn it off completely. But for this one, I would like to tone it down a little for something like 30. Something like 30 seems to work nicely. And we have base glow and we have top glow that is hidden. Now, why it's hidden? Because it is the glow for the top part, as you can see clearly here. And we do not want that Dewey well for this one, but many of them are made with the top glow as well. And you can go ahead and modify this top glow however you like. You can create a bunch of stuff here. You can make it look really nice. You see this has a really cool transition effect from color to color. This is pretty much up to your imagination, how you want everything to look like. So also, if you go to the mask editor here, you have a bunch of, a bunch of stuff here that you can play with. So global blur will blur out almost everything. And you can make these edges a little bit harder so you can not blurred them at all. If you want to. Balance, we can see for yourself what does what. And I usually keep this on default settings, but you can mess around with these really you can. The contrast, I would not recommend playing with it, but you can maybe create some cool effects with it. So blurring is usually a good, good choice. And let's just select the balance to be a bit bigger. Something, something like this seems to work pretty nicely. We can bump the texture sampling. We don't really need to. Curvature. Curvature makes it a bit nicer, but I just like to bump it a little bit up. I want these, this transition from green to some dark color that we chose. And now positioned gradient usually don't mess around with this one because this is where the thing actually starts. And usually you want to keep it at one. You can select the thickness as well that just basically think of it as power to the whole crystal material thing. So it either keep it low, you can even keep it high if you really want to create something interesting, but I usually keep it at zero. Now you have black and white spots which you can randomize there really, just to add a little bit of that detail to the whole, to the whole thing. And again, same with the top glow is the same thing. You can mess around with this and find some cool, So cool stuff that worked for you. I can even show you, I'm going to show you some of the presets actually that I use here. So maybe something like this. This also has one glowed disabled. And it looks pretty, pretty good without crutches, with scratches. Your choice, I like to just tune them down a little and see you can see a bunch of them here. This one as well. It looks really cartoony. This thing as well. It looks pretty, pretty nice. There's just one thing. I think we messed up and we didn't we didn't. So always you can change a little bit of your size here. But let's just keep it for K For now. Why not? This one looks pretty cool. You can, you can really mess around with this and this is just changing the color a little bit, adjusting some settings. Usually it's just about changing the color. Usually I don't ever change the settings and the masks, but just change the colors. So honestly, you can have infinite variations, as you can see here. Literally infinite with what you can do here with these. And, well, yeah, I'm gonna give you some closing thoughts now. And I hope you really enjoyed this little course I made. If you want to look more into the soft I make. And if you're really serious about learning 3D art, there's a lot of stuff I cover and a lot of courses on my Skillshare page. So you can always go ahead and check them out. And if you really, really like them and the end of the day, you can always check more of them. You can like them. You can sort of promote them to your friends if you want to. But I hope I, you really learned something valuable from this course today. And I hope I see you in the next course. And I hope you really make some amazing looking stuff for this. See you around.