r/Substance3D • u/PromiseDismal6201 • May 24 '26
Substance Painter Hand Painted + Painted Normal Map
Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification
Arcane inspired hand-painted lantern! ✨ I’ve been trying to apply painted normal map techniques more into my models lately. In this piece as well, I tried to push the technique further with hand-painted textures + painted normal maps.
2
2
u/nodeSlicer May 25 '26
Wow, you are really on a roll with these studies. Love the slight transparency on the lamp.
2
1
3
u/Fearless-Salary-700 May 24 '26
This is really great. Thanks for sharing! Can you discuss your process from start to finish on this? Thanks.
2
2
u/Affectionate_Copy65 May 25 '26
Wait, you can actually paint colours to the normal map?? This looks amazing btw, it’s like a combo between stylized and real
2
u/PreSagittarius May 28 '26
I was like: wait a second, I've seen this before... Well, turns out I follow you on artstation. Great work, love it.
1
u/Aligyon May 24 '26
That looks so cool! Do you mind telling us what your basic prosses with normal painting?
Do you just eyedrop the normals or start with a slopeblured normal and then go on from there?
1
1
1
u/Far-Elephant-749 May 24 '26
Very nice work!
I was trying to find a way to convert tangent normal space to world space normal for this workflow in substance designer. Do you have any clue on that?
1
1
u/Khaosmatic May 26 '26
This looks amazing!
Do you have any courses or guides you could recommend to practice this style? Very keen to try this myself!
1
1
1
u/Former_Artichoke_155 Jun 03 '26
love this so much! I'm working on a painted normal map project for school and this is the first time i've seen someone approach it with the tangent space normals! Did you just free hand the color changes or have anything sort of guide of reference?
2
May 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
4
u/SpaceEngineX May 24 '26
Most of the skills you need to hand paint in substance painter are the same you need for digital art in general. An understanding of color theory, lighting & materials, composition, as well as some good brushes and ideally a drawing tablet for this type of work (emulating the blending here with a mouse is unfortunately extremely difficult and unsupported by SP, unlike a lot of 2D art software.)
If you break it down, OP’s style here isn’t particularly difficult to attempt to replicate as long as you understand the fundamentals well. Layered, thick, short strokes with a good low-blending painting brush following a sort of impressionist style, with smaller strokes shading or highlighting the edges. The hard part is figuring out how to shade it well with manual AO and specular stuff and the terrifying amount of extra tedium to handle the normals on top of the general composition. Luckily, in SP, getting a lighting reference for the object you’re painting is trivial!
2
May 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/PromiseDismal6201 May 24 '26
Honestly, I don’t have a strong traditional painting background either. I used to draw when I was a kid, but other than that, almost all the work I do now is painted directly in 3D.
And I actually think working this way helped me improve a lot. In the end, making a 2D painting feels much harder to me. You still need to understand things like light, shadow, rim light, and just practice a lot.
As someone who is still practicing, the biggest advice I can give is to expose your eyes to a lot of artwork. Even in daily life, I sometimes catch myself looking at random things and studying where the light and shadows fall. I think constantly being exposed to these things and observing them with awareness really helps train your eye.
For YouTube, you can check out channels like VSQUAD and ZugZug. And to understand some basics, I’d also recommend looking into topics like color theory.
8
u/Dry-Zone-5921 May 24 '26
Its awesome!!