The happiness of being done these UVs and onto texturing is immense. After a while, their monotony can become a bit relaxing but it is definitely my least favourite part of the entire process. One of the most important, but grey hair-inducing.
Now finally in Substance Painter, I started off with a bake. Because this piece is pretty simple and has no high poly mesh it was pretty quick. I set the output size to 2048, checked off Used Low Poly as High Poly, and turned down the Max Frontal and Rear distances.
This was definitely one of the easier bakes. For most of my other props, I changed the output size to 4096 (sometimes 8192 if I was feeling extra spicy), set some Antialiasing, and went through a lot of trial and error getting the Max Frontal and Rear distances exactly right.
I don't know if this is just a me thing or if everyone does it, but I love throwing random smart materials on my model just to see what it looks like. Mostly just for my entertainment, but every now and then I'll put something on and realize that there are actually parts in it that I could use. Once I finished trying alien skin materials on my dock, I tested all the different wood options. Wood Ship Hull Old, and Wood Beech Veined both had parts I liked so I applied them as well as Iron Old for the nails. I gave each Smart Material folder a black mask, and using the Polygon Fill tool, switch between Mesh and UV Chunk Fill to only apply the textures to the parts I want. Using the pre-existing layers in each Smart Material, I was easily able to modify all the ready-made parameters. For the most part, it was colour adjustments, scaling, placement, balance, and height that worried about. A lot of the layers come with some kind of mask already, so having the control to adjust individual components is really nice.
With a pretty good starting base now, I decided to use the Wood Beech Veined Smart Material as my primary texture, and the Wood Ship Hull Old for the cut ends, then hid all of my folders except Beech Veined.
It was still looking pretty flat at this point, so I started adding my own layers and masks. I added a new Fill layer and assigned its colour and height to Wood Fibers 1. After adjusting the parameters and setting the layer to Overlay, it already had a lot more surface variation. Next, I wanted to add some edge definition. I created another Fill layer and turned off everything except colour and roughness. I gave it a black mask and ended up using the Metal Edge Wear generator to get the effect I was looking for. The last thing I did, was add two more fill layers set with very low opacity to tint the overall wood colouring and adjustable ambient occlusion intensity.
Repeating the same process for my wood ends material and my nail material, things were starting to come together. The last thing I wanted to do was smooth the transition between my two wood types to both make it more believable, and hide any visible seams.
DONE! Now's the easy part. Because all of my layers are easily adjustable, I grouped my three materials and duplicated them. The duplicates can now be used for any other large wood props (in this file it's my two tables). All I had to do was change the colours in each layer to make these pieces look like they were built out of a lighter wood, then change the wood grain and grunge maps around to appear different.
With the end in sight, I exported all of my texture maps and set up a material instance in Unreal 5.
I ended up having to go back into Maya to clean up a couple UVs that were slightly stretched or out of my texture space, but they were so minor I didn't need to redo anything in Substance Painter. Because I made so many of the pieces have sharing UVs, I couldn't include any big stains or scratches in this original texture or it would either look repetitive or not cover smoothly. That will all be done with decals later :)