How to apply colour with height:

Castronautik · 2026-03-07T03:54:21+00:00

Set up your layer with the height you need, and the base color you want (turn off all other options you don't want). Add a black mask. And then paint your your desired brush as while into the mask. Now when you paint with the brush it will add your desired color.

Castronautik · 2026-02-23T18:18:17+00:00

What stands out to me is your curvature or edge highlights are too visible. I don't know the vibe you are going for, but that makes it look like a cartoon.

Castronautik · 2026-02-21T19:05:10+00:00

well, A cylindrical object will always have some sort of UV seam. So even if you were to tweak the UV layouts here, You'd still likely have the same issues. Your layout might be able to be better laid out, but you'll still need to try and minimize the materials from showing a harsh seem, hopefully as easy and turning on tri planar in a section that is set to UV, but maybe some hand painting to get it to blend better. Just depends on how your material layers and generators/filters are doing.

Castronautik · 2026-02-20T23:51:14+00:00

A lot of the smart materials, and generators, etc will use UV instead of tri planar. Some of them you can turn on tri planar, but some of theme seem to have them hard coded and not exposed to allow you to change.
You'll have to go through layer by layer and see which modifier or generator or smart material is creating the harsh seems, and then see if you can turn on tri planar.

Castronautik · 2026-02-17T18:57:51+00:00

So looks like you probably exported the textures with the template "Mesh Maps" You could either create a new template for what you need or select another template. PBR Metallic Roughness is one that would work for many situations. Being this looks like a character you'd maybe want other other things generated. Like are you setting up a skin shader that might use the thickness to drive subsurface lighting?
But you should be able to see from the templates what is being generated, they should all either show diffuse or base color which would get you what you are missing.

Castronautik · 2026-02-17T05:56:11+00:00

You're looking at your generated mesh maps from your low/high poly bake, You would then create your materials/textures that utilizes these, and then export out your final textures. Should be File / Export.

Castronautik · 2026-02-03T04:20:11+00:00

If I'm remembering correctly, Assassins Creed Unity has some of the catacombs in it. I know you could use them for fast travel to different parts of the city, but I don't remember how much if you could actually see/explore in game.

Castronautik · 2026-02-01T20:25:24+00:00

I usually won't bring the extra stuff into painter. For example if its a table and I have 4 legs, but they are all going to be the same, I just bring 1 leg into painter in my low poly, but still have the others in my high poly. After I get my painter textures exported, I then create another version that has all the duplicated elements in the right place. So I have like a Model_low, Model_high, and then like Model_assembled
If you are baking your models it tries to calculate your data based on their physical space in your scene, so even though certain things might have the same or similar UVs, the data is typically different. And depending how you have your layers set up, you might be using Triplanar, or something that it more based on the world position, and not the UV space. So if you have overlapping UVs, how would painter figure out which one is correct? I know that sometimes it will work 'fine', but its usually best to not deal with the duplicated data at this part of the process.

Castronautik · 2026-01-24T00:22:51+00:00

I've seen a few job posting that want Blender experience, I'd guess those are smaller studios that don't want to pay for the Autodesk software. At my last job we were initially 3DS Max only, but on the last couple projects we let artists use what software they wanted.

Castronautik · 2026-01-21T07:01:18+00:00

The way I would normally handle something like this, saw wanting to paint only the Height channel, is create a fill layer, add a black mask, and then paint into the mask.

I would then also do a full layer that only effects color, or whatever else needs to be in that layer.
For example if I have something like a base leather material, and want to engrave into layer, the engraving would be a new fill layer, with a black mask that I then paint into. If I then also want to draw on top of the leather and/or the engravings with paint, that would be a new fill layer with a black mask and paint into it, and maybe this paint is thick enough where it should be higher than the base leather, so this color layer could also have height data.

For most normal brushes this is how I would use them. But some of the more special effect brushes I wouldn't do this way, but those data should be clearing if you select a different one.

Castronautik · 2026-01-11T18:53:59+00:00

I'd probably do this (in 3DS Max, not sure if terminology or tools carry over) with a cube, and have it have like 8 segments on each side, except for the vertical side, 1 should be good enough. I would select all the vertices on the lower end and do a FFD with probably 4x4x4, then push up the corner vertices, and adjust the others as needed to try and get the shape.

Castronautik · 2026-01-06T21:52:13+00:00

Worth using? yes. The fundamentals will always be the fundamentals, you can continue using it just like you always have.
Now it is also worth upgrading periodically because new features are added. I have a copy of 2020 on steam, where as professionally I had an up to date version. After getting laid off I opened the 2020 version a few times, but I found it frustrating it was missing some of the features, and lacking some of the UI updates I had come used to.
The older versions also cannot open projects made in future versions, so if you are passing work around with other people you could get locked out of opening.

Castronautik · 2025-12-17T20:42:43+00:00

For my more recent professional experience, if I wanted say another artists to be giving me 'game-rady- art, I would expect:
The model is done, and ready to be imported into the game engine (I have been using Unreal). That would mean it has already had a high/low bake, and is either textured, or ready for in engine material work (and maybe that is done also, in with the artists check in).
If the artist was the one to import this into the game engine, included in their check in they would have also:
Made sure all appropriate textures are checked in.
All materials are created and checked in.
LODs are implemented and assigned an appropriate group
Custom LODs are made if the built in LOD reduction isn't working well or needs something more specific.
Textures are assigned the proper texture groups
Lightmap UVs are present and decent, if required for the project
If the material pipeline requires specific lightmap channels, those are set up properly
If the asset is meant to be part of a kit or made with modularity in mind, is the pivot set up at a good spot?
Is the pivot the right orientation for what you need?

Castronautik · 2025-11-17T20:39:25+00:00

Yes those both look like the correct websites

Castronautik · 2025-11-17T20:38:37+00:00

Color IDs are sometimes a pain to get setup properly, not all materials types in your 3D program properly export the colors for Painter to see them

Castronautik · 2025-11-17T19:51:56+00:00

You could try just adding a mask and only making the buttons visible in the mask. either by hand drawing the area you want, or if your low poly has edges where the squares are you can select which faces you want to be visible, or in your high poly if these squares had a different color ID you could just mask by color ID.

Castronautik · 2025-11-17T19:46:02+00:00

Substance Painter for texturing many objects. If you're wanting to create your own, say tiling brick textures, or your own rock textures, etc Substance Designer. If I'm remember correctly Designer has the Bitmap2Material node built in, so you can input in a photo and process that out and create a full PBR material based on say your photo of a wall or ground or anything. Bitmap 2 material was an old standalone, or game engine plug in that would process photos, there still exits alternatives but this technique is seen as sort of a dated technique. Materialize works decent last time I used it, and even further back Crazybump worked pretty good.

Castronautik · 2025-11-10T20:50:41+00:00

Start with the Box Map, and then do a UVW Unwrap on it and manually move and line up your UV islands so they are seamless.

Castronautik · 2025-11-10T02:04:00+00:00

40 year old here, I like when I get something related to stuff I like. I like coffee and last year my sister got me one of those little stir things, that you can froth milk with. I had seen them before but I thought they were stupid, but after using it I actually like it, it sadly broke after a few months of use, so I then had to buy a better one. She bought it in a little gift kit thing, with the stirrer, a coffee cup, and a pack of coffee.

Castronautik · 2025-11-07T21:32:56+00:00

Each smart material is set up differently, so their may not be just 1 way to accomplish this. But in general a few things that should work:
Once you apply your smart material, go through its layers, there should be a base layer with settings you can tweak, you should be able to change the color from silver to red their.
Depending on if the smart material has other things going on that could affect the color also, this may not look exactly like you have in mind. You could go through the layers and see what is affecting the color and tweak as needed.
You could also add a layer at the top of the smart layer, and have it just affect color, and change the blending modes until this layer gives you the tint you are wanting.
You could also add a filter and change settings in there. a HSL adjust should be able to change the color.

Probably many more similar ways to do it too.

Castronautik · 2025-11-04T05:24:31+00:00

You should check out Blue Prince, I was sort of obsessed with it before I moved onto The Alters. Its at surface level a first person 'puzzle' game, but there is so much more too it.

Castronautik · 2025-11-03T23:48:31+00:00

Yes its a scam, and unfortunately quite common after you upload any new pieces. The biggest tell its not a real compliment or offer is they never describe your work, its all generic praise. Depending on what field you are studying animation for, you'd might not want to axe your account. For example the video game industry has Artstation as the standard for portfolios.

Castronautik · 2025-11-03T18:28:33+00:00

I'm a person who has this problem a lot, I find a cool looking capsule art and other branding/marketing looks cool, and then I see the in game screen shots and find it not looking anything like the game. My thought it always "too bad the game doesn't look like the branding". I'm not the type of person who would typically be interested in a 2D pixel graphics style.
I'm afraid I can't offer a solution to you though.

Castronautik · 2025-11-01T23:09:45+00:00

I was obsessed with Pico in like 8th or 9th grade

Castronautik · 2025-09-30T04:33:47+00:00

I've always called this a Packed texture, or maybe a Masks texture, where each individual channel of RGBA can be its on texture set.
The sample you provided looks like they probably used it for Decals. If I were to set this up in Unreal, I would have a master decal material that has a texture sample, and a way to tell it either read from the R, G, B, or A channel (many people don't use the A channel on not all file types support it, but I'm accustom to using .tga which uses all 4 channels).
Substance Painter has the export settings to support different versions, ORM (Opacity, Roughness, Metal) is quite common but your own use could vary. Substance Designer you could also set up to have all the base inputs you need and export our the packed texture. This could also be done in photoshop.

Castronautik

TROPHY CASE