Texturing Techniques and Implementation: Exploding

Hello everyone, my name is Alissa Corbut and I take on the lead artist role at ShadowRealm studios. Coming up with a cohesive visual style can be a challenge, but it doesn't have to be all that difficult! I will share my favorite technique I use to speed up my workflow and avoid any issues.

My favorite method so far is "exploding" models for texture work. 

To the right is a water jug storage container I modeled as an asset for our crop themed room. The character is from Mixamo and is used for scale. 

Normally, if I were to bake this in Substance Painter like this, I'd get an AO bake accounting for the walls and top that cast a shadow atop the containers. It looks like this:

Depending on the look you're going for, this might be okay, but it looks a bit too dark and unnatural for my taste.

"Exploding" means you take apart the model in 3D software piece by piece, bake your spread out model, and reimport the mesh in Substance with your exploded bake. Regardless of the *position* of the mesh in 3D, the UV shells stay the same. This method typically clears up any strange artifacting and weird AOs, and it also can be helpful for UV stacking, or any objects that will be animated. I always do this trick if my initial attempt turned out strange or miscalculated.


Here's how an exploded model looks in Maya:

After baking in Substance Painter: 

Now the containers aren't so dark! All I did after the bake was go to "Project Configuration" under the Edit tab and just swap out the models.

From here I texture like normal, this time without worrying about any weird dark places I may have gotten from my initial attempt.

 Here is the final render!

Here are more models done with the explosion technique:

 The exploded model in Maya:     

Thank you for reading and following along our development for Trade N Transit! We are excited for you to see the cool assets in game and textures. I hope this was helpful in solving any potential issues with baking!