Captain Project Blog 13 - Alpha Experiments

General / 01 November 2020

I plan to experiment with alphas in Photoshop and also Substance Painter.

ALPHA TEST 1 - PHOTOSHOP

I started with Photoshop as I know this process quite well so it would take a small amount of time. I used photobashing to create fabric strips that would cover most of the cape and wrap around the chains.

I also created eyelashes and the epaulette fringes.

I then added an alpha channel and filled the objects in white and the background black. When back in RGB mode I coloured in the background similar colours to the objects to prevent a white outline later on.

I then brought the alpha onto a plane and used the cut tool to slice the individual objects apart.

I tested out the fringe around the epaulette. I like this appearance but I feel that missing normals won't look too good once the rest of it is textured.

The eyelashes are good as they are very small and won't really be seen up close, so they do not need much detail.

ALPHA TEST 2 - SUBSTANCE PAINTER

I followed a brilliant tutorial by youtuber Han Solo on using opacity maps in Substance Painter. The process was actually very straightforward and simple.

I started with a simple sculpt of my cloth strips in Zbrush using the large plane to start with then shaping it from there. I used a combo of the ZModeller, move and clay buildup tools, along with pinch and ZRemesher to refine the torn edges.

I duplicated them and changed them slightly in shape and length.

For the epaulette trims I layered the pieces of fabric in a fanned shape so that they would connect from corner to corner well without a strange overlap.

I also used reference of moth-eaten cloth to create masked out holes in the strips.

These are the final high poly sculpts for the alphas. I then retopped them very simply in 3Ds Max using planes with two edges in the middle to bend them to shape.

I then unwrapped them very simply on a 512 sheet, making sure I used the space as effectively as possible.

For the bake I had to experiment a lot with the settings to achieve the correct normal map. As you can see below, the cage was not big enough at first, and so I had to increase it until the plane took all of the details of the sculpts.

Once the cage was big enough I could see that the normals were correct. I then took the normal map into photoshop to create an alpha channel in black and white, and imported it back into substance.

I then changed my viewport settings to metallic and roughness alphas This resulted in the opacity map being put into place. I had to also ensure that I added an opcaity channel in my layer settings in order for it to work.

I then textured them using imported materials from my main substance painter file so that they matched well. They are supposed to be worn strips of burlap.

I added my alpha symbols onto the strips, and changed the blending options and used an eraser to create an uneven worn effect to imitate painted fabric.

I put the alphas into position using the High poly sculpts as a guide first.

I used 3 repeating cloth strips around the edges of the cloak.

The long alpha strip was wrapped around the shackle and the handle of the sword.

Finally, I added alpha strips to the chains to imitate the concept.

Overall, my verdict is that the Substance Painted alphas are a lot more effective and match the rest of the character's textures much better than the photoshop alphas. They also come with a lot more maps rather than just the diffuse and opacity.