Hi gang!

(update Oktober 2023 => for some reason several images in this guide are suddenly gone while the reference is still there. I'm pretty sure I never removed them. I fixed one, but some others are lost for now).


A little about me

I'm a 3D CGI hobbyist; I've been using Daz Studio for several years now, build up quite a nice library of assets (figures, props, sceneries) and until recently I've been relying on ZBrush for everything regarding the editing of my 3D items ever since I moved away from Hexagon.

ZBrush is an amazing 3D editing tool, even its texturing features are very nifty, but there's always a difference between using a tool that "also" supports texturing, or to use a tool that was solely designed for that specific purpose. So when I discovered that you could purchase Substance Painter on Steam I didn't really have to think all that hard about it.

I may sound like a fanboy but in my opinion Substance Painter is one of the most powerful and versatile texturing environments out there. Then if you add Substance Designer to that mix you'll have a power combo on your hands! But more on that later....

About this guide

I'll be taking things slowly so you don't have to worry about not having an in-depth understanding about either Daz Studio or Substance Painter. However, I will assume that you're at least somewhat familiar with the general basics of CGI and rendering... so you know what modelling is, you heard about render engines, and you're (roughly?) aware of shaders and sculpting.

Don't worry, I got you covered ;)


The main issue we need to address, as pretty much always within the world of ICT, are the standards. Or better put: the lack thereof.

If I export a figure from Daz Studio I'll end up with an Wavefront OBJ file as well as an MTL file which contains the material settings. So I fire up my trusty ZBrush editor, check its material settings and... uh oh... ZBrush uses ZMT files for that! Fortunately for us we can actually design materials for ZBrush within ZBrush itself (cool, huh?!) but still...

Oh, I know! Because I'm a bit of a "ZBrush fanboy" as well I wanted to expand on its rendering capabilities, so I ended up with KeyShot 10 Pro for ZBrush; a full KeyShot environment but only usable from within ZBrush. I got lucky because these days it's subscription only (and IMO seriously overpriced). Oh dear... what do you know? So KeyShot uses KMP files for its material presets! And while it does have an import option for materials which also tells you that it supports the MTL file extension it won't process any materials from Daz Studio.

Standards you said? HA!

So why does this happen? Well, apart from companies refusing to cooperate, this specific example also boils down to the render engine being used. Daz Studio relies on 3Delight or Iray, ZBrush relies on its own render engine or the external KeyShot. And KeyShot in its turn relies on... its own real-time render engine.

The thing is that material presets are first and foremost meant to control the way in which a render engine processes any objects within a scene. For example: a ball made out of metal will reflect much more light than a ball made from (rough?) plastic or cloth.

Fortunately it's not all bad!

You see, there are still some standards in place. If we go back to Daz Studio, load in a Genesis 8 figure and then check out its textures (don't worry: I'll explain in more detail later!) then you'll come across entries such as "Base color", "Translucency color", "Normal map", "Glossy layered weight" but also entries like "SSS Mode", "Top coat", "Emission color".

Now where have I seen those names before...

Oh, that's right!



Substance Designer of course!

Could these similarities be our link between Daz Studio and the "Substance universe"? Wait a second here, does that really say "PBR materials" in the screenshot above? See the lower left corner, in the Library section?

See, Daz Studio has a texture section called: "PBR Metallicity/Roughness"... the plot thickens!

Substance Painter is a program that allows you to load 3D models, we refer to those as meshes. When you loaded a mesh you can then change the way it looks using Substance Painter. For example, when I loaded the chair shown above it was all white, so I applied a golden material to the seat, made its legs out of cobalt and then decided to paint that leaf logo.

On the right side of the screen you can see that Substance Painter has also updated the texture map of the mesh.

But how does all of this even work?

Here you see the original chair in Daz Studio, and its texture map....

When you create a 3D object it doesn't have any specific properties which defines its look other than the material setting. This is the basic preset which defines how an object will react within a scene when there is a light source. As mentioned earlier: something out of metal will reflect more light than something from plastic, cloth or paper.

But that's not all: we can also apply a texture to an object. A texture is an image that gets "folded around" a mesh and this texture will determine what the object looks like.

If you look at the chair within the Daz Studio screenshot above you'll notice that it's blue. But if you check some of the material properties, look above the texture preview for those, you'll notice an entry called "Lighting model" and that is set to "Metallic". That is the property which defines how any incoming light should be processed.

You see, a program like Daz Studio likes to keep things somewhat simple and easily accessible, so they basically combine textures and materials and refer to this combination as a material setting. So if you have a piece of clothing and you want to change its color you apply material presets, but in reality all that's really happening is that the new setting simply uses a different texture.

Now, if we bring this over into a program like ZBrush...



Here I loaded the same chair, you can see that I also applied the same texture but... it's red-ish? That's because ZBrush does apply a strict separation between materials and textures. While the texture may be blue, the material is red wax; a material setting that is specific for ZBrush. Because of that we get a red chair with a blue covering.

But if I change the material to a light reflective metalic...



... then we get our blue chair back. Trust me, this will become important later. The lesson to learn here is that a material defines how a mesh reacts within a scene, a texture defines its looks but both properties can have an influence on the the way things will look.

A generated UV Map within ZBrush.

Last but not least, one final issue needs to be addressed: I mentioned earlier that a texture is basically an image that gets "wrapped around" a mesh. But how does that work? I mean, if I have a 3D cube and then load a round image you can bet that it won't fit at all.

So how do we know how to "wrap" an image around a 3D object in the first place?

That is what a UV Map is used for: a UV map is basically a 2D representation of a 3D object.

Warning: this isn't necessarily the texture itself (but it could be) but more so the 2D representation of said object.

This is an important detail because... if you compare the UV map in ZBrush with the earlier texture preview in Daz Studio then you will see similarities, but also small differences as well. This is something to look out for sometimes.

Remember: the purpose of my guide isn't just to show you the trick of "How to load a Daz Studio figure into Substance Painter", I also want to try and explain to you how all of this works. Because that is the key to solving problems like these on your own!

Ai is a character based on the Genesis 8 female model. So the thing about Genesis figures is that they don't use one but multiple texture maps, these are applied to surfaces within Daz Studio. A figure like Genesis has multiple surfaces such as the head, arms, legs and torso.

So the first thing we need to do is determine what kind of figure we're dealing with:

• Add a Genesis figure and select it in your scene.
  
• Open the Surfaces pane and select one of the surfaces; I selected the face.
  
• Go over the properties to identify what type of figure you're dealing with.

For example, if you check the list shown in the screenshot above you'll notice the specific PBR setting in the Base mixing property. But also check some of the other properties like translucency, specular reflectivity and if you scroll further down you'll even come across a normal map definition.

You can also see mention of a general Genesis 8 Female figure. Ergo: Genesis 8 is PBR compatible. What's PBR you ask? Physical Based Rendering[en.wikipedia.org]: it's a method which somewhat moves away from the traditional ray-tracing approach where a material preset mostly focusses on the reflectiveness of a surface. For a more in-depth explanation you can follow that WikiPedia link.

The point here is that Genesis 8 is compatible with PBR. And therefor its texture maps and settings will reflect on this, no pun intended.

Now let's look at an earlier generation. This is Ash, is a character based on Genesis 2:



Well, apart from the fact that we have different surfaces (head vs. face for example) you can also see some specific properties like diffuse, bump and displacement. Not to mention specular and sometimes even opacity is used.

No mention of PBR, therefor it's safe to conclude that Genesis 2 is non-PBR compliant.

This may seem like a lot of theory to take in but this is important to know because Substance Painter may look simple, but don't let that deceive you: we're working with a highly professional environment here that supports the latest standards.

Therefor we need to know about the theory behind these mechanics in order to make it work. You'll soon see why.



When you have your Genesis figure selected go to File => Export. Be sure to use the Wavefront (OBJ) file format and in the properties panel you can use the default "Daz Studio" profile, however be sure to disable the "Write material library" because... we're not going to need that.

As you can see I saved this as a separate profile already.

Copy the textures folder location


There's one last thing we need to do: copy the location of the texture maps. If you look at the previous screenshot you'll notice that I highlighted sections where the "arrow icon" also shows a small bitmap behind it. If you hover your mouse over this icon it'll show you a preview of the texture map, I've already shown that earlier on. But if you click on the icon you'll open a menu, see above, this allows you to select a "known" texture map but also to browse for a new one. So you need to click browse:

Obviously I applied some censorship here to keep things family friendly.

Select the folder in the location bar and copy it to the clipboard.

Now we're ready!

(image removed by Steam?)

Start Substance Painter and then open a new project. Select the 'ASM - PBR metallic roughness' template as shown above, but make sure to change DirectX in OpenGL; this will better match the Daz Studio maps.

Maybe good to know: if this were a Genesis 2 figure ("Non Genesis 8"?) you'd be using the "Non-PBR" preset, it's that simple ;)

Then make sure to enable the "Auto-unwrap" option; this will ensure that Substance Painter is going to use the right UV maps, remember those? Click Options, just to make sure you're using the right defaults:

• Seams, UV Islands and Packing should all be set to "Generate only missing data".
  
• Both layout customization options should be set to default (small & unconstrained).
  
• Maximum UV tiles set to 4 (this doesn't fully matter).
  
• No optimization options should be enabled.

Finally set the color management to "Legacy", just to be sure. Then click OK:



You will probably get some errors about Painter not being able to load some material presets, you can safely ignore those. We're only interested in the textures. Remember my comments about meshes not having any properties of their own, save for the material preset? And my story about the different environments in my setup which all used different render engines and thus different materials?

That is what you're seeing above: we loaded a mesh and thus Painter applied its default material settings, just like ZBrush did. The main difference here is that this material preset is white and in compliance with the render settings we selected. And because we selected a PBR render engine our figure is going to look very close to what we have in Daz Studio, you'll see.

Speaking of which... we'll need access to the textures, so either use "File => Import resources", or you can also click the '+' icon on the bottom right side of the Assets pane (at the bottom of my screenshot).

You might notice that my Painter GUI doesn't look like yours; by default the assets pane is shown on the left side of the screen. That's because Substance Painter (and Designer too!) allows you to fully customize your workspace, and I can highly recommend that you do; keeping things easy to use for yourself.

Because I'm not interested in any texture / UV maps I'm going to press F2 so that only my 3D model will be displayed from here on; I like to rely on the texture set list pane (see upper right corner) to check what Genesis surface got selected.

But first our Genesis textures:

After you clicked + (or used the option in the File menu) click "Add resources" in the upper right corner of the new dialog. Your OS file browser will now show up, point it to the folder location we copied earlier and just do this the lazy way: press control-a and add everything:



This is important: Painter needs to know what type of resources we're dealing with here. So... in the above dialog press control-a again to select everything, then change the type specification for one entry to "Texture" (as shown above). This will change everything to 'texture', just what we need.

Also: since we're working on a project make sure to import these resources to your project, do not add this to your library; that will only create a lot of unnecessary clutter.

I probably should have picked a male character to avoid the need for blurring, but it is what it is. In the mean time I also added the texture maps for the swimsuit, and I think you're going to be surprised later on when we dive a little bit more into Substance materials.

Now that we have our project and added all the texure maps we need, it's time to apply our textures to the Genesis figure so that we get a good representation of our model. First things first: Daz Studio referred to all the different areas on our Genesis model as surfaces. Now, if we look at the upper right corner of our Painter interface we see the "Texture set list" pane in which all those surfaces get mentioned. Ergo within Painter we don't refer to these areas as surfaces, but as a texture set.

It's but a detail, but when you work with different environments it's important to use the right naming conventions in order to avoid any possible confusion.

So about our texture sets.. Yes, I'm being stupid here: If you look at the three blurred sections above you'll notice a colorful blob ("Ai Torso diffuse"), a light grey blob ("Ai Torso bump") and a dark grey blob ("Ai Torso specular").

That hints at a mesh which doesn't use PBR. Which is exactly why I picked this as my example... so now what?! Well, if we go back to Daz Studio for a brief moment we can recall that the base mixing was definitely set to PBR and when we look at the base color property ... we see that the "diffuse" texture map was assigned.

SO... Press control + alt and right click on the figures belly, this will select the torso texture set ("surface"):



Now click on the second tab icon ("channels") in the texture set settings pane, as shown above. I marked a channel that should sound familiar right now. See: the material properties that Daz Studio uses, such as Base Color, Opacity, Specular.. they're all channels within Substance Painter.

Since we don't need the Height, Roughness, Metallic and Normal channels we can simply remove them: click the 'x' icon behind their names. Then click the '+' icon after the 'Channels' header and add "Specular edge color" and "Ambient occlusion".

Then open the "Layers" tab. You'll see a default layer called "Layer 1", remove it by clicking on the trashcan icon. Then add a "Fill layer". This will allow us to "Fill" the mesh. With a texture map for example...

Now click the 2nd ("material") tab in the Properties pane shown at the bottom of the right column. You'll see mention of "Material mode" Or (literally) then a second section with all the available channels. That is the key to adding the Daz textures to our Genesis figure:

I really should have used a male figure I suppose.. oh well...

So now we have 3 channels here: 'Base color', 'Ambient occlusion' and 'Specular edge color'. Yes, I am well aware that these are not the most optimal channels to use. But they work! Here I added "Ai Torso Diffuse" to the 'Base color' channel, "Ai Torso Bump" went into the 'Ambient occlusion' channel and finally: "Ai Torso Specular" was placed into the 'Specular edge color' channel, just using drag and drop as demonstrated above.

The result should speak for itself.

How did I know where each should go? Once again: by looking at the Surfaces pane in Daz Studio and the properties of one of the surfaces. Because if we look back at 'DS' we'll see:

• "Ai Torso Diffuse" in 'Base color'. (also in "Translucency" which I ignored for now).
  
• "Ai Torso Specular" in 'Dual Lobe Specular reflectivity'.
  
• "Ai Torso Bump" into 'Base Bump'.

Not fully the same as the channels in 'Painter' but it comes close enough.

So now... we need to repeat this process for every texture set ("Surface"):

1. Select an areas on the mesh; example now being 'Arms'. Use ctrl+alt and right click.
   
2. Select the "channels" tab in the texture set settings pane and remove: "Height", "Roughness", "Metallic" and "Normal".
   
3. Add the "Ambient occlusion" and "Specular edge color" channels.
   
4. Open the 'Layers' tab and remove the default "Layer 1" layer.
   
5. Add a "Fill layer".
   
6. With the fill layer selected check the Properties pane at the bottom.
   
7. Make sure you have access to the textures in the Assets pane.
   
8. Now drag & drop "Diffuse" into the 'base color', "Bump" into 'ambient occlusion' and finally "Specular" into 'specular edge color'.

Warning! The sequence in which you do this is important: a fill layer will not "just" get new channels when you add those to the texture set property. So define the channels before you add the new layer.

This example works for the "Ai" character, others may need different approaches. For example, I also happen to own the "Sukai 8" character - one of my favorites - and that character actually includes normal maps for Daz Studio. So obviously you'd keep the Normal channel around in that situation.

Things to keep in mind:

• Some "surfaces" (texture sets!) use the same texture map. Ai's ears use the same texture map as the face for example. The fingernails use the same texture map as the arms (same for the toenails: these use the same texture map as the legs). Normally looking at the texture (or its impression) should show as much. But keep this in mind, it's important to know because you can instance layers to other texture sets and that will save resource usage.
  
• I usually hide the "Eyelashes" because... it just doesn't work too well, also because it's often ignored in the character model. Same applies to "Cornea".
  
• Modern characters also 'inherit' base settings; Ai for example also has a surface called "EyeMoisture_Genesis_8_Female", these are also best ignored, and thus hidden.

And then we got to the swimsuit.....

(image removed by Steam?)


I don't know about you, but I am pretty happy with the final results. Because the texture maps didn't provide the motif which you saw on the swimsuit in Daz Studio I had to improvise a little bit, I think it worked out quite well..

And before I forget: to save storage space it's usually a good idea to use the "File => Remove unused resources" option so that you don't end up with unused texture entries in your project. It'll save storage space and reduces clutter too.

So now that we have the full textured Genesis 8 character within Substance Painter it's time to apply some customizations, wouldn't you agree?

Of course there's a problem (what else is new?) => the moment you even try to click on the figure somewhere you'll be greeted with a warning: "Fill layers aren't paintable!".

Sure, the warning also adds a nice button to click but now would be a good time to reflect on what we just did, and what we need to do next...

Everything in Substance Painter evolves around layers. If you fire up a new project, "just" load a mesh with full default settings and then just start painting? Why do you think that works? Because of the default layer added by Painter, and the default layer provides... painting capabilities.

What we did above was remove that layer and replace it with a fill layer to which we applied one (or more) texture map(s) to cover our mesh. As a result Ai looks roughly the same as she did in Daz Studio, but now we want more.

Now, as I will show you in a moment painting is too easy... so before the Fire nation gets wind of our new avatar let's add an effect which would make it look believable that she just crawled out of the dirt, just like the legendary Aangh once did before her...

• Select the torso; press ctr+alt and right click on her belly.
  
• Make sure the 'Layers' pane is open & visible, then add another Fill layer.
  
• Uh oh! Now our figure turned partly white again, that can't be good!?

Don't worry: there's nothing wrong here. Try to hide this new layer by clicking the eye icon in front of it and you'll see what I mean. But instead of using white we should actually use a nice dark brownish color:



Click on the color strip below the 'Base color' map entry, as shown above (notice my mouse pointer in the screenshot?). Then select the brownish color and when you're done you can just close the color selection window. Mission accomplished!

Don't worry, we'll need this brown color but I also agree that we need our texture back as well. So... click on the new fill layer to ensure it's selected, then add a "Black mask":



Here I already added the mask to show you the results, but this is the location you'll need to click. As you can see the black mask makes sure that all our other layers get visible again. So now we're going to do something cool: click on the 'wand' icon and then select "Add Generator":



Once again I already beat you to the punch (you guys are just too slow! 😉) but I also marked our next point of interest: select a generator! Go for the "Dirt" generator.

After that click on our new fill layer to fully select it, right click, and use "Copy layer(s)". Then select the arms: press control+alt and right click on one of the arms. Right click in the layers pane and... paste our dirt layer. Do the same thing for the legs.

Everything changed when the fire nation attacked...

And then we covered Ai in dirt. What a dirty trick of us... 😁

So what happened up there? See, that's another cool thing to know about layers in Substance Painter: they can do multiple things. At first we added a new fill layer, changed the 'base color' to brown which then also changed the color of our figure's texture set. So we applied a mask to prevent this from happening. Then we added the dirt generator, which is basically an effect setting. And because this effect applies to our fill layer it covered the full texture set while using the base color which we defined earlier.

Now sometimes you may notice a hard edge between two areas, as demonstrated above. If that happens then you should try and mess around with the amount and scale options (as highlighted above) but sometimes this effect just cannot be helped. In that case you can always do some "post-render editing".

So here we added the Ai figure to Substance Painter, covered her in dirt.. and now it's time to help her get home again, it's the least we can do to make up for all this ;)

Now let's reflect on what we really did up there...

• We loaded our Genesis character into Substance Painter.
  
• Then we added all the available textures to our project and assigned some of the texture maps to their appropriate channels within appropriate texture set.
  
• In specific: the fully colored texture maps were assigned to the "Base color" channel.
  
• Optionally we also removed any textures we didn't use; this does not affect our project though.
  
• We then applied a dirt effect directly onto parts of our mesh using the base color channel.

Wouldn't you agree that the only thing we actually changed here was our texture map? Thus.. the base color channel?

Time to put this to the test.. let's export the texture maps! Use: File => Export textures:



So the first thing you want to do is use the menu icon (I highlighted it) to de-select everything, then only select the texture sets (or "surfaces") which we actually changed. In this example that would be the torso, arms and legs.

I suggest you ignore the cloth & trim surfaces here: I'm just curious to see if I can get the swimsuit customizations back into Daz Studio as well. But that's just me playing around while writing this guide. Ey, I wanna have some fun here too! 😄

Instead focus your attention on my mouse cursor: notice how it lists 6 maps? Yet the only thing we need is our regular textures, in other words: the base color channel. So... select all the surface which we want to export by clicking on them, and make sure that the only selected map is the base color.

It's not a big deal, but this will save us some time.

When you're ready click on "Export". You'll see a new dialog and if all went well it will have exported all our texture ("color") maps:



Click the "Open output directory" button (highlighted in my screenshot) and make sure to copy the folder location, just as we did before with the Daz Studio textures. Then hop back into Daz Studio...

People who have actually been paying attention may now wonder... "What about her head?". In case you didn't notice that white arrow didn't get there all on its own ;) Yah, I completely forgot about the face, so I quickly exported that in between as well.

Back to Daz Studio:



I think this worked out quite well, wouldn't you agree?

So basically I did the same thing as before: I clicked 'browse' in the "Base Color" selection menu, but this time I pointed the browser to the export directory and loaded the customized texture map. And I did this for all customized surfaces. The results can be seen above. Even the swimsuit doesn't look at that bad I think.

Of course this isn't fully perfect... if you look closely you'll notice that the back of her head has dirt on it while her face is perfectly clean, save for the arrow. I probably could have done something about that but... maybe for another time.

This section was added later after I had already published the guide. You see, I wasn't really sure if I should address this part but when going over all my typoes I decided that I should anyway. See, it's not directly related to the process of editing Genesis within Substance Painter, but it could be...


So earlier on in my guide I mentioned something about a pattern not being visible or such on the swimsuit. Fun fact: there was never a pattern to begin with:



So here I loaded Ai and applied the swimsuit again. In case you're interested this is the so called "SlankSuit" and is available on the Daz webstore.

In the main viewport I changed the preview settings and instead of using basic texture shading I now applied a PBR compatible render engine called Filament. In the small Aux viewport I kept the regular default texture shading active.

That pattern you see? Optical illusions. These merely happen because of the fine-mazed texture map which is being used, just look at the preview; it's a pattern based texture called 'DenseWeave'.

So what if we want to use another texture? Well, then we have 2 options:



As you can see Substance Painter comes with a nice collection of texture presets which we could use. My only problem with that is simple: it's not very original to use existing presets. Sure we can apply some differences by customizing the property settings, but still...

So why don't we create a texture of our own? How? Using Substance Designer of course!



So here I fired up 'Designer' and started a new so called Substance graph project; so basically a graphic project of which I can use the results within any of the other Substance programs, like Substance Painter for instance.

Just for demonstration purposes I added a "Mesh 2" node on the left side; as you can see 'Designer' can actually generate its own weave patterns right out of the box! But you can just ignore this for now: it's not connected so it doesn't really do anything.

Instead check out the "rice shape" figure I created; I also rotated it by 90 degrees after which I sent both shapes into a so called "Tile generator". The result can be seen above: instant pattern design!

Now, you may be wondering why we'd want to bother with all this? I mean, it's a rather simple pattern, surely we can easily recreate this in a graphics editor like Gimp or so? Just set up a nice fill pattern, select an area and done! See, the thing is: everything you see above is fully dynamic. If I change the shape within the shape node then the texture gets fully recreated using those new changes. For example, if I want the shape to become thicker I just open the properties of the shape node, and increase the 'X size'.

You know what? Let's do just that: customize it a bit more!



So here I applied a fur pattern onto the shape, I then increased the intensity a bit because otherwise it would be difficult to see, and then I applied the rest of the process just like before. At first this looks like a more gray'ish type pattern but if you look closely you'll notice the texture on the shapes itself as well.

But now I have a bit of a problem... I think this new design looks cool, but I don't know for sure if this will still look good when I apply it to the swimsuit. I'm sure that the "non-textured" shape is going to work for my texture, but ... maybe this custom shape is just a bit too dark?

Now this is exactly why you'd want to use something like Substance Designer!

See, as I mentioned before everything within my project is dynamic: I can change things on the fly. But it doesn't just stop there: I can also set up global parameters which will allow someone using this graph in another program to apply these same customizations as well!



So here is my full project. On the right side, in the blue frame, we can see the tile generation process which I also used before: both the original shape and the one that gets rotated 90 degrees are both sent into the tile pattern generator.

But before all that I added a so called "Blend node", and named it "Shape selector". See: a blend node can process 2 shapes and, well, blend them together. But I can also use it to switch between one input or the other.

Now, if you look at the properties pane you'll notice a blue parameter called Opacity. That's what I'm using to switch between both shapes: full opacity means that one of the shapes is displayed whereas 0 opacity means that the other shape is shown.

The blue color indicates that I have exposed this parameter. In other words: I made it accessible from outside the scope of this single graph. You'll soon see what that means ;) In the mean time I'm going to publish my graph, this means that it gets saved in a format which can be used by other Substance programs, and then I'm going to add this to my project in Substance Painter as a new resource:

Notice how Painter recognizes my project as procedural?

Now, if I wanted to use this graph in more Painter projects I'd add this to my library, but because I fully made this for my swimsuit I'm only adding it to the project:



And here we are.... As I figured the "noisy rice shape" was indeed a bit too dark, and because of its small size the pattern wasn't even really visible anyway. However.... as soon as I changed the base color to a more dark-ish blue tone all of a sudden my "textured shaped pattern texture" (lol) was really in its place. Now the default pattern was actually a bit too bright!

Best of all: this is a texture that no one else has just yet, which means that we really have something fully original on our hands.

Seriously you guys... if you have both Substance Painter and Designer you can forget about ever buying any new textures packs ever again. Why bother? You just create your own textures and materials!

I've said this many times before, I'll say it again: Substance Painter and Substance Designer are two seriously powerful tools which should be something to consider getting for everyone who is being serious with working on computer graphics.

As demonstrated in this guide you can use Painter to enhance pretty much any mesh available out there, even Daz Studio's own Genesis line of figures. It'll take some time and effort, but it's perfectly doable.

Substance Designer then can be used to create or customize your own toolset and use all that within Painter as well. The sky truly becomes the limit, as the saying goes.

Thanks for reading, I hope you guys enjoyed and that this could be useful for some of you.