Baking Textures with Blender and Substance Painter

Over on 3D Artist, Sami Tarvainen explains how to use Blender and Substance Painter in tandem for texture baking.

Here we’ll be going over a workflow for baking textures using Blender’s Subdivision Surface/Multiresolution modifier and Substance Painter’s texture baking. The tutorial covers a variety of different processes, techniques and my favourite tools, so don’t let the title fool you!

Because this tutorial is meant to cover the processes which come after base modelling, we’ll skip the preliminary designing and the actual modelling phase and use a mask where all these things have already been done as a base for this tutorial.

I’ll begin the tutorial by showing the things that I usually do before the model is ready to be converted into a high-polygon model using Blender’s Subdivision / Multiresolution modifier. These will include adding additional edges to the model, useful tools and shortcuts – I know, it’s a lot of edge looping. The mid-section of the tutorial is dedicated to making a low-polygon version of the model by demonstrating how to remove unnecessary edges and sharpen the edges.The last part of the tutorial is mainly about the preparation of high and low-polygon models for texture baking in Substance Painter as well as the baking process in the software itself. We’ll also learn how to export the models and what kind of settings to use for exporting.

This is an advanced tutorial, and therefore knowing the basics of Blender and the knowledge of using tools would be preferable before beginning this tutorial. Saying that, I’ll try to cover as much as possible by using detailed images and describing the tools and shortcuts I use, but there will still be things that the tutorial assumes you know. I hope you enjoy reading this tutorial and – more importantly – find something helpful you can use in your future projects.