3D Still Life

The project consists of three main texture sets:

Base – the simplest texture set. This layer contains the paint information of masks 01–02, which I’ll explain later.

Mid – adds some paint smudges to the textures. This texture set contains the information from masks 01–04.

Highlights – this layer contains the toony highlights, along with all the other layers I painted for the scene.

For this project, I experimented a lot with the Smudge tool and the new stylized filters in Substance Painter. I used them at the end of my pipeline to increase the texture contrast.

The Smudge tool and stylized filters affect all of my texture sets in the end. My most important paint layers are exported later on as masks:

Painterly – a simple base color with some variations.

Painterly + Volume – additional painterly layers combined with volume layers like Ambient Occlusion and Curvature.

Mid – all the paint strokes used for the mid-level texture set, with medium to strong contrast compared to the painterly layer.

Highlights – the most contrasted paint strokes in the scene, mainly used for heavy accents and toony highlights.

Extras – a simple ID mask.

Extra Volume – another set of volume layers plus some baked shadows and lights for extra contrast.

Concept Shadow – a mask used to create the toon shadow in comp, closely resembling the concept.

Shadow Noises – two noise masks exported from the concept shadow, allowing further tweaks to the shadow pass in comp.

There were several tri-planar noises in this scene; these are just some examples. These masks are mostly animated and affect multiple attributes such as normals, opacity, and displacement.

All selected objects are tri-planar textures, with animation speed and scale varying depending on the attribute and shader they affect.

I normally make my lights with a standard aiStandard shader and later reuse the same light rig in the main project. I prefer to have a kind of standard lighting setup that I can tweak later.

Most of my lights don’t produce any indirect lighting, which makes them pretty cheap to render and gives me the opportunity to render with very low samples.

Since my materials don’t contain any expensive parameters, the animation is stepped, and everything has emission, I’m able to work with this kind of sampling.
Please, clap.

The project is divided into three main render layers (using my three texture sets):

Base – the most basic shader, with the lowest emission and movement.
Mid – this layer only shows information from masks 03–04.
Highlights – this layer only shows information from masks 05–06.

All shaders include some variation in their diffuse roughness, specular roughness, and emission.

The background only uses the first two render layers.

Brush layers are used to break the silhouette of certain objects. They are placed behind the main layers.

You can see the difference on objects like the bottle, table, and watch, where the silhouettes are no longer perfectly clean.

The toon shadow is a mask I used to control how the main shaders react to light and to further adjust the look in comp.

The toon spec is another mask used in comp to add an extra layer of stylized specular.

You can see the toon shader driving the mix shader. When in shadow, the mix shader produces a darker result with reduced displacement, normal, and opacity information, which makes some paint strokes disappear.

The metal spec is a simple layer added to bring extra specularity to the scene.

The shadow pass comes from the key and kicker lights, which I later modified in comp.

The metal pass was most notable in the background, where it was used to add extra white lines.

The shadow pass, in the end, was a combination of the shadow render layers, the three shadow masks, and Ambient Occlusion to give the scene its noisy look.