Design and Development #5 - Normal maps

With the UV map sorted its time for texturing. I decide to start up substance painter eager to draw up some normal maps. It was the first time formally using substance painter for a real project other than just playing around. It was difficult to find out how pan and rotate the camera and there was alot of setup to start painting normal maps, but once I started it was easy!

My first few goes consisted of using default brushes to see what I could do. The left image showcases using black and white brushes for height (which will then be converted into a normal map) and the left image showcases normal map brush. It took me a long time how to start painting straight on to the model using the normal map brushes I had to watch multiple tutorials to know what I was doing.

Back into blender I decided to bake the pieces of floating geometry floating above my ship into height map texture that'd I'd use as a brush. It didnt turn out so good...

The baked texture didnt turn out the way I expected and didnt work well in substance painter either because the colours werent right (a height map consists of black and white colours which transalate into high and low, and since I had a massive grey square surround the circular shape it didnt print out like i wanted it to)

So I bake some normal maps instead