How to Paint Realistic Skin in Substance Painter



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In this texture painting video, you’ll learn the texture workflow for painting skin in Substance 3D Painter.

Favorite Brushes – 04:34
The Hand Painting Workflow – 09:28
Adding Procedurals – 16:52
Finishing Touches to our Texture Maps – 22:58

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23 thoughts on “How to Paint Realistic Skin in Substance Painter”

  1. Little correction regarding moving hand painted textures. There is a transform filter which can be used to move and scale paint layers around ^^
    For masks and textures I use cloud textures for almost anything. Scaling them down, reducing contrast + a little blur is a great gradient. A little more contrast with the layer set to multiply is also great.
    I also like to use the blur slope filter in combination with grunge & texture maps to get some more subtle breakup. Works great with stuff like cracks.
    As for brushes I'd add the felt tip brush, which is my go to choice for adding hand drawn text and the charcoal strong.

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  2. i have just painted a great white shark… i think i did a great job for my first serious project, i saw some of tutorials of flipped normals about skin, but never saw about fishes or other animals, so i applied this techniques for my shark.

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  3. Love the freckles! Ya I like to mix zbrush for some details too, blur slope as a mask and with blending modes helps to break up a little bit the pores and stuff, the inverted pimples is good to make a uninverted layer and with bigger expanded curvature to get a contour in it, well just things that I tought watching the video 🙂

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  4. ADSURD! just an hour ago I was going to start painting a skin in photoshop and it's something I don't do very well I thought, I could use a tutor…..oh!

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  5. Do you normaly paint your albedo map in Substance? I used ZBrush for texturing the albedo, spec and roughness. Is it just personal preference or is substance painter better than just painting directly in ZBrush?
    I usually just use Substance for getting different cavity maps.

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  6. It's a great tutorial overall but I see an interesting trend in here. Most of you show focuses on the basics (following your terminlology), and it doesn't really help much in understanding the fundamentals. Sure, I can follow along and re-create the same colour zones that you do by following your mask, but that's not much of a lerning process. You point out several times that we should observe the source and try to work from it, and we shouldn't rely on colouring charts, but developing observation alone with no reference points is an extremely complex skill – it's almost like if you go to Tibet and the monks tell you, 'sit here and watch your breathing until you reach the enlightenment.'

    I know that there's just so much more to study when it comes to where the skin is red than how to use fill layers in Painter, but even glimpses of various ideas that would focus the viewer's attention on specific spots would be so much more appreciated – often there's not enough underlying knowledge to even know what to google for. One example I can think of is a paper called 'A Practical Appearance Model for Dynamic Facial Color' (https://reality.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/skinperf/skinperf.pdf) that I found via Outgang Laura Gallagher’s videos. While it's extremely techy and complex to reason, Laura explains the basics behind it enough for someone to follo through and study e.g. the influence of hemoglobin on the face. You can even find sometghing like XYZ's utility maps tutorial (https://texturing.xyz/pages/how-to-use-the-utility-map) and see how would hemoglobin generally map to the facial areas – from there your tutorial is super useful in actually recreating a similar map and applying it to the texture.

    So, TL;DR: please, include more details on fundamentals, some pointers of what actually influences the colours we have to pick, and – basically– some keywords on how to research it further.

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  7. Love this! Do you think you could do something for makeup specifically? I always find I have to revert to 2d image editors for that and then have to account for the UV which is not ideal.

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