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Creating Animal Fur for Games in Substance Painter

by Joshua Kinney

In this game design tutorial, we'll learn how to create believable fur for animals in games. Software required: Substance Painter 1.2, 3ds Max 2015, ZBrush 4R6, Photoshop CS4.

What you'll learn

In this game design tutorial, we'll learn how to create believable fur for animals in games. We'll start off by discussing some key points to remember when sculpting and modeling your game animals, like whether or not we should sculpt the fur and what loops are most important to allow our animals to animate properly in game. Then we'll move on into texturing the main mesh of the dog. First, we'll explode and bake out the normal and ambient occlusion maps. Then we'll import our dog into Substance Painter and begin painting our base texture. During this process, we'll discuss how to map out the flow of the fur, how to block out fur color, how to blend the colors to unify the fur and how to add subtle detail to make the textures pop. Finally, we'll wrap up the game design training by learning how to texture fur with alpha properties to break up the smooth silhouette of our dog. Software required: Substance Painter 1.2, 3ds Max 2015, ZBrush 4R6, Photoshop CS4.

About the author

Joshua is a devoted games author at Pluralsight. For years Joshua has been a key author behind Digital-Tutors' (now a Pluralsight company) popular game engine training. As a kid, he had a passion for playing video games, which eventually developed into a fascination with the process of game creation. The question of "How'd they do that?" led Joshua on a quest to learn to make these games himself. Ever since then, Joshua has devoted his life to creating games, as well as teaching others to build ... more

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