The Transubstantiation of a Battleship

A Sirentide-class Battleship conducts maneuvers with a light escort composed of two Summers-class Destroyers and three K-Boats after a visit to the shipyard.

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My biggest Substance Painter project to date. It's been a godsend, allowing me to add additional details and apply realistic materials to my models while reducing render times quite drastically. With my old procedural-based material-ID setup, each render would have taken 1 to 3 hours on my work laptop. Now, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes on average.

My old setup essentially applied up to 18 sub-materials to polygons I assigned material IDs to, then fed that into another material that added edge wear and procedural damage such as craters and burns in the armor, even allowing me to determine how hot and fresh the damage was with some user properties strings. That was then fed into another material that assigned damage based Arnold's Clip Geo shader, which I barely used since my render times were long enough without it.

Now that I've cut down render times, however, I'm more free to experiment and integrate that method of damaging my models into scenes.

That said, I spent about 75 hours learning and practicing how to use Substance Painter on the Summers-class and Torpedo Boat models while refining my workflow in preparation for Sirentide and other large ships. My first project was the Summers-class, which was relatively unoptimized as I neglected to slice the model to one quarter along the long axis. She used a 3x3 grid of UDIM tiles, rendered to 4096x4096. The next project was the torpedo boat, which I sliced horizontally and used only 3 UDIM tiles rendered to 4096x4096.

Then came Sirentide, which is about 1.13 kilometers long. I sliced the model into quarters, then further divided that into 6 different parts. Each part used a 2x2 grid of UDIM tiles, save for the midships section (including the side engine pods) which used a 3x3 grid. This meant a total of 34 maps, further multiplied by the number of inputs needed for 3ds Max's PBR - Metallic material. The result was a total of 174 separate tiles. Initially, I rendered them in 4k, but I realized that 2k was just fine for the distances I rendered at.

Now that the 'transubstantiation' has delivered substantial results, I'm much more free to experiment with scene setup and arrangement in 3ds Max, including TyFlow and other systems.