Working on Fabric Textures in Substance Painter

Character artist Ray Le shared a breakdown of the production process behind his Shu Li’s (the character he created for the Artstation Challenge: Ancient Civilization) dress. Ray’s latest project, a Sanxingdui Shaman, is all about marvelous fabric texturing. Looking for some tips and tricks on working with 3D clothes? Here is something useful.

So, what is the process here? First, he created a tileable color texture from a photo. Then he created a fill layer and apply the color map to Color, Rough, and Height in Substance Painter. He selected the fill layer, added two adjustment layers “Levels” for Roughness and Height, and played around with them to separate the embroidery from the red fabric. After that, he just created another fill layer, unchecked everything except Height, and filled it with a displacement map from MicroFabrics. You can find more details here. 

Here are the final results: