Texturing with Mari and Substance by Noah Schick

Greeting Everyone,

this is Noah and I hope you enjoyed my Reel. Now I'd like to bring you along for a deeper dive into the creative process of my glove project.

Sliding Glove

I love longboarding, and even though I am quite the rookie at downhill sliding I own a pair of sliding gloves. They made for a great hero asset for my first demo project. Since I have the real world object I want to rebuild at hand, I can make use of a bunch of perks: I can take as many photos for projection and map extraction as I want and I can scan the object to have a really accurate base for the sculpt. And that's exactly what I started with.

The sculpting process started with a 3D scan I took with Polycam 3D. It was easy enough to take, but all of the parts around the velcro band had to be remodeled from scratch in Maya.
One of the challenges on this project was how to solve all the seams and pieces of overlapping leather. After some manual trial and error I found out there is a fairly straight forward way to make roller brushes in zBrush, which worked perfectly for all the seams and stitches. Thus I only had to keep a few patches and the linings as separate geo, which saved me a lot finiky work.

Texturing

Before starting any painting or projecting I always create all my mesh maps (AO, Curvature,..) and sometimes some generated maps with Substance Painter and bring them over to Mari through a Geo-Channel. Furthermore I set up Isolation Masks for each area that shares a material.

The glove is made of leather, felt, carbon fiber and a plastic sliding puck stuck to the glove via velcro.
Due to the nature of this leather - being so monochrome and reflecting - I wasn't able to extract many projectable textures from the photos I took. I ended up building the leather material completely from scratch and used only contrasty parts of the photos, like the wear and the punctures as mask stencils.

The key is to work layer by layer, from tileable base to small wear marks and to focus on only the base color before spending too much time on other channels.

The carbon fiber material among others was built with Substance Designer and tiled it into it's respective ISO mask in Mari, before painting wear and breakup onto it.

To bring the whole piece together I extracted and painted a dust mask, which I later used in Maya to blend a dust material over my glove material.

I created the fuzzy velcro and its opposing tiny hooks with Houdinis grooming tools.

Finally I mixed the texture for the ground with Quixel Mixer and it's library, used curb and metal post from Megascans and added some foliage I derived from the Chaos Cosmos Browser.

The texturing work took many iterations and I would like to thank Giorgio Lorenzetti for the continuous feedback and support!