Mat Mountain

I only stumbled across Meet Mat 3 (and the Rookies) a couple of days before the contest deadline, so unfortunately I wasn't able to get my submission finished in time. I really enjoyed this challenge though, and learned a few new things in the process.

Ideation

I experimented with a couple of different ideas for texturing Mat before settling on the Mat Mountain concept. Rocks, mountains, and environment details are some of my favourite things to paint, so I'm already pretty familiar with using these types of materials in Substance Painter.

Materials

I experimented with several different rocky materials in layers, to use as my base material. I used imported materials I downloaded from Substance 3D Assets in combination with different colour layers, masks, and attribute adjustments. Because I wanted Mat to appear similar to a huge monolith, I adjusted the height and detail of the rock layers to give the appearance of that kind of scale. I found that using triplanar projection for the materials rather than UV projection also helped to give a better appearance of the scale.

This took me a pretty long time to get right. I'd baked a high poly version of Mat to the low poly, but I found it a bit difficult to get the height of the small details right without breaking the mesh.

Texture Painting

Once I'd adjusted the height of the material layers on the head to something close to what I wanted for the final texture, I painted several layers of detail, including patches of wetness and tiny plants. I also added more shading and edge/curvature detail to the rocky base.

I added a snow material to the top of the head, experimenting with different combinations of snow materials imported from Substance 3D Assets. I'd never used/created a snow material in Substance Painter before, so I did a bit of research and watched a couple of tutorials. I played around with subsurface scatter and transparency parameters, as well as different layer and mask combinations, until I created a result I was happy with.

I also textured the front face/disc with a concrete-like stone texture. I used two materials, a flat stone base layer and a painted light moss layer. I used a mask on these materials to paint the cracks on the stone that show one of the base layers from the rest of the head underneath.

Curve Painting

I'd never used Substance Painter's new curve tool before, and as an artist who's very familiar with drawing curves in Adobe Illustrator, I was excited to try it out. I decided to start with something that wasn't too complicated, and drew a simple glyph design. I textured the glyph with an emissive material and started experimenting with displacement on it.

Displacement & Emission

I decided I didn't like the emissive material on the glyph, and instead adjusted the height of the mask to cut through to another stone material as a base layer (highlighted in the image above). I experimented with dusted snow on the face, but removed it in the end because I thought it might complicate the concept.

I painted a new emissive material onto the texture inside the head, with a little transparency on the edges to give the appearance of a glow from inside.

Rendering

I've never used Iray to render before, but the parameters are pretty similar to other renderers so I didn't have much trouble working them out. I did have some trouble rendering the snow material correctly though (I couldn't work this out for a long time and watched a lot of tutorials :P).

I'd been happy with the displacement on the body and base from the start of the project, and I was really happy with how they looked rendered. Although the vegetation material looks a little spiky from the displacement, I like the cliff-like appearance of the body. I textured the base to look like an island, with water in the hollows of the Substance logo. It was a little bit ambitious to add the water material, which just has a wet appearance and a little bit of transparency, but it's not really a noticeable detail in the final renders.

Rendering Snow

I tried to narrow down the issue with the snow by turning off the displacement layers and experimenting with some different parameters on the snow. After experimenting with different combinations of channels and sliders on my two snow material layers, I figured out that I needed to have both scatter and translucency channels activated on the materials in order for them to render correctly.

I grouped the snow materials, and added a soft dirt texture smart mask. I also painted some detail into the edges of the mask using various dirt brushes.

Lighting

I'd been using a Substance environment map (Bonifacio Aragon Stairs) to light the project while working on it, but I thought Mat would look better with the cooler lighting of a snowy environment. I imported a snowscape HDRI map to light my final renders.

I rendered my final images at 2488x1279 with transparency. I'm not familiar with Iray, but I do have a powerful PC, so I set my samples and Max Time very high, with both Caustic Sampler & Firefly filter enabled. My final images took about 15 minutes each to render.

Final Touches

I created a matte painting in Photoshop for a backplate, using stock photos from Adobe Stock. I added the Mat Mountain renders, and made a few minor colour and gamma adjustments.