Directions unclear: spent 3 hours imperfecting my perfect texture

Its really good to add a grunge on subtract blending mode over the edge wear and then add another one on linear dodge. Then its much less uniform.

You guys had the opportunity to make a "Substance Abuse" pun and it never happened and I've never felt so let down

I had a painting teacher a long time ago who stressed the importance of not using paint straight from the tube but instead coming up with your own “recipe” to give your colors a more unique feel.

I remember back in the day when you actually hand painted the textures in Photoshop and manually did overlays and masks etc. Back then it was easy to spot that one rusted metal texture from cgtextures that everyone and their granny used. :> Now you just spot smart materials. I feel old.

I learned this in sorta a hard way.
I downloaded a ton of smart mats for an asset I was making, and just tried almost all of them on. And it never ended up lokking the way I wanted it too.
So in the end I realized, that I had to do the rest of the work myself.

I would love to see more Substance Painter videos.

I like how you dig into the actual creativity here, unlike so many tutorials out there that only show you the technique.

For a second I was scared, like "Oh man I do that!" And then you showed the cleaning-up and the brushing part. And then I felt at ease. "Oh man I do that!" :)

There should be a "Life Saving" button. Thanks so much, FN.

as a programmer, not a designer I like baking out the generated maps like curvature and process them with some low scale noise, before putting them back on.
Smart materials are most usefull to me when I finished one object with massive stacks of procedurals and save it all to a smart material so I can keep a coherent look on multiple objects.
Once all of this is done I rather use shader to get the fine differences between multiple objects in the shader.

Flipped normals allways thumb up !

Thanks for the advice. I think the problem is that most "Substance Painter video tutorials" tend to get too long winded in explaining something as simple as adding a smart material to a fill layer. Instead of taking things one at a time they will have 5 more layer and black masks before they tell you they are done. I think people that watch video tutorials are too afraid to point out mistakes in videos that make it hard for them use the program fully.  You do not have to know how layers or blending modes work in other softer but they feel they need to explain whether you have or don't have this other software.

Also it helps to understand the process of coating materials. Is it powder coated, e-coated, Anodized, Booth spray painted, or electroplated? What are the characteristics of each? Where is the coating thicker for each type (they aren't all capable of even coating)? Where is the coating the weakest and vulnerable to weathering? Once you understand that, then you can create more realistic weathering and corrosion.

The two dirt brushes are definitely the go to. The mold one is also good for not just mold but a whole lot of other stuff. The dots are also good, but I also use a lot of alphas to paint masks, especially the fingerprint and palm print stuff. The square-brush looking alpha is also good for making things look like as if they were physically painted.

I just wanted to bring the great point you guys made about the different stages of rust and wearing of paints. There is also the additional coats paint and use primer to consider that has different looks and principles compared to other paints

Apart from it giving the asset much more character and not looking so generic, I also find it much more fun to go over it layer by layer adding grunge and details by hand.

Great points about the item history and timeline. Lots of applicants tend to ignore this and don’t walk the item through its own history. How many kids climbed the item and where are their feet likely to land? Where will dust settle? Whats is the path of water and what dries first? Chains swing and people drop things to gouge and nick paint layers out. Well done video for making this priority.

I try to avoid using smart materials (or at least using all the layers of a smart material). It’s easy enough to layer your own textures or use the standard materials and layer them that I barely see the point in using smart materials that come free with substance (unless you’re just figuring out how they work or something of course). Substance is so powerful, using smart materials just takes so much of that power out of your hands and into the hands of a boring algorithm

Also useful tip - by using F1, F2, F3 buttons, you can quickly switch between UV view, 3D view and both. Great for getting a quick look upclose on textures.