REALISTIC Creature Texturing Painting Tutorial Using Mari and Substance - By Zak Boxall

My name is Zak and I'm a texture artist in the VFX industry. I wanted to make this creature texturing course to help people wanting to start out in the vfx industry. I carefully structured this course to be of the highest of quality that you’d expect as a full standalone creature texturing module in a university.

****GUMROAD LINK****
http://bit.ly/3dc9Jk7

What is this course?
This is a pre-recorded online texturing course, with each step recorded and structured into bite size chapters. Going from preparing a model for texturing - through to exporting final textures out of Mari.

In the VFX industry it's almost impossible to be given an asset without photo reference to work towards, and this course will focus on creating photo-realistic textures. We won't be creating these textures from our head, we'll be referencing photography though the entire process to give us direction and inspiration. We’ll talk extensively on how to break down this photography and building the textures based on your own observations, to come up with a plan for how we will approach the asset.


I just want to say a big thank you to Penggao Yu - he is the talented modeller who sculpted this crocodile. Check him out!

artstation.com/yupenggao


We won't only be trying to paint aesthetic textures, but doing so in a way where we are able to plan for any eventuality. This could be a model change, UV change or client requests. Essentially have great looking textures, whilst being flexible to changes.
This means that we need to approach this asset with the mindset of incorporating the right balance of technical and artistic skills. We’ll work in a structured way using the incredibly powerful node graph where we will mix the efficiency of procedural methods to establish non-destructive, full coverage to ensure we can make changes on-the-fly to account for any changes, but with the ability to art direct every layer for custom paint work.

This will ensure you finish the course not only with technical skills of how to use the software, but with the confidence to take everything you’ve learnt to tackle your own creatures for that killer, industry ready showreel piece.

****GUMROAD LINK****
https://gumroad.com/l/GVnjP

We are going to be using Mari - by the foundry, which is the current gold standard texturing package that you need to know to get a job in the VFX industry. It’s the most hardcore texturing package out there, and every VFX film you’ve seen in the cinema since Avatar has extensively used this software.

We’ll start from the ground up, starting from the interface. No fancy plugins are required and this will ensure all the techniques are accessible for everyone of all levels.

Speaking of aiming this towards all levels, Mari comes with a free non-commercial, non-watermarked license, which is perfect for people wanting to learn, level-up or work on personal projects at your own pace with no time limit.

There’s only a few limitations between the licenses, the main restrictions being the amount of UV tiles you can use and export resolution.

With this in mind, whether you have a commercial or non-commercial Mari license, I’ll give you the option to download one of two crocodile models. One model will have the amount of tiles you’d expect in a production environment and the other will fit within the amount of tiles allowed in the non-commercial license of Mari.

We will briefly dip into Substance Designer where we will load a cavity map extractor, this a tool that I’ve created which only requires a displacement map, it will generate a variety of different masks we will use in the texturing process. No more baking cavity maps out of zBrush or high poly models again.

Mari can be really daunting when you first open it up. It’s certainly not the most intuitive pieces of software to pick up because it’s just about as bare bones as you can get, there are no templates, you don’t get anything for free which means you have to build everything from scratch.


This can seem like a lot of effort when there are alternative software available that will build a lot of this for you, however this reliance on templates and presets can give less experienced artists a false sense of what’s involved in texturing for visual effects.

This being said, mastering Mari will not only get you a job in visual effects, but it will force you to learn how to build textures from scratch, and is integral to starting a texturing career with good habits, and a strong understanding of the fundamentals of building flawless texture maps.

You won’t be a master of Mari after one course, but I can assure you you’ll learn a lot to get you started in your career.

Telling a story through textures to give the illusion an asset is living and breathing is the most challenging, yet rewarding, type of work for me.
With that said, I present Realistic Creature Texturing Painting Using Mari.

I can’t wait to show you.

*GUMROAD LINK*
http://bit.ly/3dc9Jk7