Mastering Asset Texturing and Custom Filters with Instamat SDK

Good evening everybody. You are watching the Abstract live stream and my name is Manfred. I'm the CEO of Abstract and we

have a great totally unscripted show for you today. And as always, I'm not alone and I think with me is once again um

Jeremy maybe we can switch to Jeremy so Jeremy can say hello to everybody. Fantastic. Jeremy, how you doing?

Uh not too bad actually. a bit colder in New York City. You know, leaves are starting to fall, seasons are changing.

Um, but you know, as things often do in New York City, things just keep moving on. You keep pressing on.

Yeah, same here. It's actually a beautiful Wednesday here in Germany, the 1st October. We have a lot of things to

talk about. I think it's going to be a very interesting show for you guys. Um, one of the things that we're introducing

today is the plug-in SDK. So we got a lot of requests from the community to allow them to be able to build um

integrations into other tools that we don't build like Maya or Max. So I think that's going to be really interesting to

see how the community is going to build tools and what kind of tools they're building.

I think the apps the the SDK for inat is going to be going live today. At least that was our initial plan. But one of

the issues that we're seeing is that a lot of our team is sick currently. Even this production, we're just winging this

one. It's not the usual team, but we're trying to do our best. But we expect the announcement on our website to go live

and the binaries to be available and then everybody can just go ahead and build integrations. That's pretty

exciting, right Jeremy? Absolutely. So, I guess what what makes this uh this SDK this plug-in SDK a

little bit different than something like Instamat Pipeline where you're running something in the command line?

Um, yeah, I mean this SDK is designed for integrations to allow people to integrate into tools and there's going

to be some some rules and regulations into the things you can do and the things you should not do. For instance,

you should not try to build something like instamat pipeline or build a command line application. That would be

absolutely against the terms and I I think we're going to enforce those because we do have to make some some

money after all. But it will allow the community to integrate into tools like Houdini or into some Nvidia remix um

pipeline tools to directly bring the content from Instamat into whatever application you're using. I also look

forward to seeing an Instamat inte integration into tools like GDO for instance. I think that could be really

interesting or even seeing Instamat integrated into into competing tools. That would also be funny to see.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's one of the things I'm really noticing is that the the community for insting to grow

and so be by being able to give these tools to people who are really invested into uh you know integrating Instamat

into their workflows with other tools other engines other dcc applications I'm really excited to see how they use the

SDK for that. Absolutely. I think it's going to be super interesting. But let's just um as

you so this we don't have a new release planned today besides the plug-in SDK guys. We're still working on it and what

we're trying to do with this show is just to give you guys a direct access to to me as the CEO, but also to the team

and the news. We will be doing more regular updates for Instam Madden and Installot and all of our tools. But this

show today, it's going to be more of a hangout. We want to we do know that we have to produce more um educational

material to show you how our tools work. And there's a lot of ideas we have for for this abstract live stream today um

and also for the future. And I think we're going to start by just trying to do some texturing and see how we can

build a um um project for in in asset texturing where we just show you guys. Okay, that's how it works. That's how

you texture an asset or at least that's how I I would texture an asset. There's many many different ways. There's

different ways to do things as always, but this is how I would do it. So maybe let's directly jump over to the um

screen share. Mr. Producer, thank you so much. All right. So, you should be able to see this beautiful splash of the

Instamat September 2025 release, which I hope you guys have installed. And what I want to do here is I'm going to go to an

asset texturing project. And I'm I'm not going to use a custom mesh. I'm just going to start off with the create

tutorial that I'm sure you guys are familiar with. But we're not going to use just the

stock tutorial. We're going to delete all of the layers and start from scratch. I want to show you guys how to

bake and what you have to to look for because I think we're getting a lot of questions around baking, right Jeremy?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I've seen on our uh community channels and Discord the baking workflow is is a lot of, you

know, a lot of times what people focus on at the beginning because often times it is the first step, right? It's how we

take our um you know high poly models that we've you know done subdivision surface modeling or we have some sculpts

from something like ZBrush or Blender and we want to be able to bake and transfer those details onto a low poly

that we've generated. So yeah, I think it's a great place to start today. Yeah, and I think baking is it's

something that's difficult to get into, but once you know how it works and you know the ins and outs, it's not as

difficult. It's a mysterious topic because it's not as approachable as modeling something in Blender, but once

you get it, it's it's very easy and you don't have to to stress yourself that you have to bake something. Especially

in Instamat, we try to make everything as automatic as possible. So, here's the crate and I removed all of the baked um

data. And as you guys know, in the lower left corner, you typically have all of your baked data here. So, as you can

see, I removed all of the the bake information. And what we have in the viewport is just the naked crate. And

what you can see is that the lighting on the crate doesn't look so great. And that's something that when when when we

used to build games, we tried to make our meshes as efficient as possible. And this typically includes not having a lot

of normal splits because if you do a normal split, you have to split the UV so the lighting looks correct. So one of

the ways that we did it is to try and have a smooth surface where possible. So this is why a lot of our assets look

pretty funny if you would look at them naked like this crate. So normally you would expect the shading not to distort

around these areas but as you can see it's it looks pretty funny but once we bake the mesh you'll see that it looks

pretty good. So to bake the mesh if you would start clean and you load your mesh instamat would automatically show you

the baking dialogue. We don't have this here but you can always bring up the baking window by just clicking bake

mesh. So I'm doing this and as you can see here is your our bake window and you could bake without a high poly mesh.

That's another question we get quite often. But you do want to have a high poly mesh to bake a notch a much nicer

curvature map to bake a much nicer normal map. You really need to have that high poly mesh available. And even if

you just start you you you start off with a low poly and you didn't your your colleagues or you didn't model a high

poly mesh, it's still worth to apply a subdivision um modifier to just to have the surface smoother and have nicer

curvature on the mesh because that detail will be transferred to your normal map. But I do have a source mesh

here. So I'm clicking on a button to pick a local file. Actually here that's the first question like what is the

difference between this pick package resource and pick local file right? So package resource basically means if you

have a file stored in in your package you can just pick it from here or you can pick something even from the system

library but typically it doesn't make a lot of sense to bake down the cloth ball. So in this case we're going to

pick a local file and I have my crate right here. So that's the the high poly mesh. can even

I can show you guys how this would look like. So, I'll open Insta Lot Studio and I'll just bring in the same crate

that I just brought into Instamat. All right, guys. So, here you can see our high poly mesh and it's essentially

the same crate, but as you can see, it has much nicer details on the much nicer curvature. That shouldn't be done.

Um, much nicer curvature, more details, much nicer bevels. I mean, these days you could just bake your low poly and

then bake the bevels using a bevel sampler. But if you have a high poly, if you can create it, I would still go go

that route. Let me actually reduce the size of the dog. Right. We got a question or or actually a

comment here just about baking. Uh, someone mentions, you know, it would be nice if we in the future add the ability

to have like a a visible cage for baking. Is that something we're looking into or or you know you know one of the

things I find about instamat is often times just to quote to quote the phrase that it kind of just works most of the

time and a lot of the times it has to do with like the preparation of you know making sure the UVs are good to go and

you know I have some experience making you know knowing what works and what doesn't um but you know yeah what what

are we looking at here in terms of uh how best to prepare a mesh for good baking and you know what what are we

looking forward to in the future? Yeah, I mean we do want to add visualization for the baking. So you can see the

baking cage, you can see how the race would be, you know, produced and all of those details. But that's something that

other tools added really really late in the game. We're talking about a 10-year development cycle when the feature got

added. But it's something that we want to add really soon also to be able to to paint normals and to have a bit more

artistic control over the baking cage. But by default, Instamat's baking cage is really good, and you should be able

to just um load in your source mesh, hit bake, and you're good to go. Just make sure that the overlap between the low

and the high poly is as close as it's as it's possible. And you can achieve this typically if you follow the subdivision

surface modeling workflow. So instead of creating a separate low poly and a separate high poly, you would just model

using the subdiff workflow. And then you export it once using a lot of subdivisions as high poly mesh. and you

would export it again without any subdivisions for the low poly mesh and then later you could remove all the

edges that you don't need. But we found at our studio that this was the best workflow for for hard surface assets to

just use subdivision surface modeling. Nice. And I also find that I used install to generate a low poly for me

often using something like the remesher or the polygon optimizer. So, if you're looking for a really quick way to take a

high poly model that you've done with subdivision work already or or high poly sculpt, you could easily just toss it

into Install or even do a remesh voxalization in Instamat to automatically generate a low poly as

well as an option. Absolutely. But that's not something we're going to look into today. That's

something for for another stream. this it's a beautiful workflow to go from some random super dense mesh using

insulot to a low poly that has all the baked data and then directly loading that into instamat that's a beautiful

workflow I love it but today I just want to focus on the baking and the texturing about how we would do that so going back

to the screen share and our baking window here um we have a two different bake engines you can use it CPU and GPU

and the CPU baker is super fast a lot of people just use the CPU baker but the GPU baker has some benefits especially

when it comes to baking a lot of um samples for your AO or curvature map. But it also has limitations. So the CPU

CPU baker scales beautifully over gigantic meshes and it's more robust when it comes to um non-manifold and

broken meshes versus the GPU baker. You're VRAMm limited and you're limited to how big the buffer can be that's

processed by the baker. And what you also have to consider is that the CPU baker and the GPU baker are two very

different bakers. they don't really share any code and that makes it difficult for us to have feature parity

and do it exactly in the same way. We're trying to but there's always some things that you can do in the CPU baker that

the GPU baker cannot do but it's typically more advanced stuff so I don't think you you easily run into those but

but do you recommend that if like a bake isn't working out in one of them to try and swap over the other just to test it

out? I mean, most likely it probably will work pretty well, but you know, maybe it's a good idea to try something.

You know, you might be running out of VRAM, for example, with the GPU and just switching over the CPU would be better.

Yeah, if you have a two or three gig uh VRAMm GPU, then or even a a shared memory card, it might be better to start

with the CPU baker. But if you run into issues, what I would recommend first is to reach out to us and let us know about

these issues because we want to fix them as soon as possible to make sure it's ultra hardened. So, I would I would use

the GPU baker here to to start with. And then the next big um question that always comes up is what is the best

baking resolution. And the best baking resolution is not just 4K or 8K. The best baking resolution is the resolution

that you intend to export your mesh in. Because if you if you bake at 4K and you down sample it to 2K, there might be

some artifacts that happen from that down sample because you don't have that perfect pixel pixel mapping. So, keep

that in mind. It's good to bake at 4K or 2K and then export at whatever resolution. It's a very small

difference, but you shouldn't have it. The the difference between the bake resolution and then the the the export

resolution shouldn't be too big. But the beauty is you can always just rebake and things are going to work out just fine.

So, I'll just use a 2K bake resolution here. And super sampling, just always keep it at two 2x minimum. If you don't

use super resolution, there might be some artifacts that you see more easily. That's normal. That happens to every

baker. That's why the industry introduced super sampling. So just keep it at 2x. It's typically perfect.

So I keep it at 2x here. Um and then when I'm when I'm iterating over my bake, I don't want to create all of the

baking targets. So on the right side, I can disable all of the targets that I don't need to make sure that my bake

looks good. So I'll just bake the normal tangent space here. It gets a bit more advanced what you should change here

with the tangent space settings like by normal per fragment or um normalize per fragment. Um, if you texture an

Instamat, just keep it on OpenGL if you intend to do that because you can always export as DirectX when you when you use

the export window. Um, but when you texture, the input normal map should remain OpenGL. That's what Instam Mat

likes the most. And the binormal and normalized settings really depend on your render. So, if you want to get

ultra accurate rendering, you would want to enable and disable those features depending on your rendering engine. But

keeping them off, the the the issues you'll get from it are fairly minor. But if you go for that ultimative per uh you

know accuracy, you'll need to figure out how your shader renders that normal map in the end and then you know set it up

exactly as the shader in your rendering engine um would use the normal map. So let's just keep it like this. And down

here you you can control how the bake actually works. And by default the if you have good overlap in your meshes

that means all of the meshes are overlapping. You know you have like a handle on the high poly here and you

have a handle on the same location on the low poly. Those ray length are really good. But if you have a more, you

know, obscure workflow where you position things far apart, you would have to increase the ray length. Or if

the the differential between the the high and the low poly mesh for some curvature is very big because you want

to bake some inner part, you would have to increase for instance the inwards ray length here.

A lot of times I find that if I am getting any anything baking on top of each other or some some shadowy

artifacts or anything appearing you know unexpectedly around separate pieces or surfaces lowering or raising the ray

length is the first thing I jump to first. Yeah, that that's actually that's a good

approach. I I do agree to this. This is this is a good thing to iterate on. And then we have um ignore back faces. That

basically means if a ray would hit a polygon and it's facing this direction, the ray comes from here that we would

then ignore that face and the ray would go through it because it would want to find a face that would match what we're

baking to. So by default, you should just keep that on. There might be some cases where you don't want this, but for

the most part, you should keep it on. An average normals normals is basically um what you what bakers need when they

don't respect the geometry uh the vertx normal set on the geometry. Instamat does that. So you can do some skewing on

the vertex normals and instamat would use those. But if you have a flat shaded mesh where all of the normals are just

flat shaded, that's that low poly look, you would want to enable average normals. Otherwise, you won't get like a

nice curvature over the mesh. So that's similar to how we were seeing our our low poly crate from earlier,

right? Those those normals are more average, therefore giving you the the rounded look. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. That's that's average normals that you can see right here. And that's the look you would expect.

Great. Yeah. And then targeting mode is one of the more important settings. So let's

see what happens if I keep it on all source meshes. The other option would be to bake by mesh name. But if I just bake

this like um this I'll hit go. Yep. Let's go. So it's doing the bake. It's already done. And let's see what we have

here in the viewport. So this looks good on a first glance. Let me close this. But I do see some artifacts. For

instance, the handle got baked on the body. I don't know if you can see this, but there's the handle right here. And

then we have some part of the high poly handle baked on the body. And that's something that you don't want. Like this

kind of artifact is terrible because you get the that fake lighting that shouldn't happen that got baked down

from the high poly mesh. And to avoid this, what you would want to do is you go to your um bake window again and you

just enable um by mesh name and then re-ake. So let's do this.

Right. So before it was taking the entire mesh into account, kind of baking it all at once. But now that we're using

by net my mesh name, it's looking at the mesh suffixes, right? The underscore low underscore high for example to make sure

that certain meshes are only baking onto each other and not onto other surfaces. Exactly. And that's what I did and it's

clean now. But if we look at the crate again in um Installot Studio, I can show you exactly how this this looks like. So

this our high poly mesh and as you guys can see if we select the handle here it has that suffix underscore high. So

basically what happens if you bake by mesh name that on the low poly we expect to have a a mesh in the scene that would

have the name underscore low and this would find the corresponding mesh with the name underscore high and then bake

it down. There's also something that most people are not aware is that you can actually

bake multiple things down. If if Instamat finds a mesh that matches the low poly name and has additional, you

know, suffixes on the high poly side, all of those would be baked down. So you can use that to bake four high poly

meshes down to a single low poly mesh. It's a bit difficult to wrap your head around, but it's pretty good when it

comes to the authoring workflow. So, if I had multiple objects that have the same name uh with the suffix

underscore high or underscore low, then it would bake it down onto that that one surface that matches that name.

Exactly. Awesome. All right. So, this is looking pretty

good. So, I can now go on and just bake all of my um bake data here. So, what do we need?

We need ambient occlusion. We do want to have the curvature sampler here, the world space normals, a mesh ID map,

position map, a thickness map. I think those are all that we need.

Yeah. And then you might ask, why do we even need a position map? A position map is great and that's really important if

you want to do things like gradients over your mesh or if you use the mesh volume mask. This is where we we would

use the position map. And the position map is not just the low poly positions. It's actually the high poly positions

which allows you to do a mask that is that is controlled and influenced by those details on the high poly map. You

you don't need the position map if you don't have it. Instamat would use the geometry data as is, but then you can

only do the mask on the low poly geometry, which means you would lose some detail. So it's always good to bake

it. And so so you can actually use that high poly detail for your masks on the low poly.

It's also worth mentioning one of the maps that we're not including here, which is a mesh ID map.

Didn't know we do include it here. Oh, I didn't see it so far in the corner. I was saying in this in this

case, usually uh we don't necessarily need a mesh ID map for the various uh masks that we use. Right.

Right. Indeed, if if we mask by polygons or by sub meshes, we don't need it. But if you have details that you only have

in the high pulley that you don't have on the low pulley that you want to mask, you would still need a mesh ID map. So

you can per pixel select those details. The curvature map is also a pretty important map and it shares the settings

with the bevels baker. So you can find the settings up here in the curvature settings. And if I would enable the um

the bevel normals, you'll see it's now called curvature and bevel normal settings. But I don't need the bevel

normal. So I'll disable it. And we added this new mode for disk sampling and normal gradient. And the the main

difference is that the disk sampling works similar to a um ambient occlusion sampler or a thickness sampler where we

don't just cast one rate to get the information from the high poly mesh. We would actually cast a number of rays to

to gather a bigger curvature. Whereas the normal gradient would calculate the curvature map based on the normals that

we're baking on the normal gradient. So you would get a much smaller gradient. If you want to get the nicest and

biggest curvature that's possible, you would want to use the the disk sampling mode. And you can increase the sample

count. And again, it's one of the reasons why the GPU baker is nice because you can use a lot of samples and

it's going to look very nice. So that's the curvature sample AO. I don't think we have to say much about AO

sampling. It just it's the contact shadows that make the mesh pop and look very nice. And in real time engines, you

can use those for very dynamic and beautiful lighting. And the thickness baker allows you to do effects based on

thickness. Like if you have rust and you want to apply your rust mask only on thin metal sheets, you could use the

thickness sampler to to build a mask that would then only apply to those thin parts on your mesh. So you would

basically create a mask that uses metalness and also the thickness sampler and then you can dial in where you want

to have that rust. Right. I always use the thickness map for things like um subsurface scattering

and other other renderers as well. Yeah, fair point. That's a really really good way to create a subsurface

scattering mask as well. That's true. Maybe less so for hard surface, but if you're doing something with plastic

where lights shining through, you could do some really cool stuff with the thickness map.

Absolutely. So, here's our our crate. I baked the details. You can you can see them now here on the left side.

And um if you want this is also a question like how can we look at the bake information

that we have in our uh viewport and we added a note for this. Let me see where it is. Um I think it's here in mesh

layering you have that select baked data note which is very interesting. You can use it for mask as well. But if I just

drop it here and then it looks weird of course because our default projection is trip planer. But once I switch it to UV,

you can actually see all of your bake outputs and you can select what you want to visualize in the viewport. For

instance, we could choose to um visualize the normal tangent, the world space normals, the position map, the

curvature map. So that's a good and nice way to quickly just go through all of your different um bake results. If you

go to the thickness map, you see what the what the baker did here is that it recognizes that the the box is very

thick, but the handle is very thin. So the the thick parts are black and the the thin parts are black and the thick

parts are white. And you can see that in areas where it's like somewhat thin, you'll get that gradient here because

the ray casts through the mesh. All right. So to start texturing this assets I this asset I would always start

with the base layer and then work my way upwards in a rough outline and then refine. So to start I would go to the

material library here and search for some kind of a metal. Let's see if we find an iron here. Dirt iron. Greasy

iron. Um yeah, let's just take that dirty iron here and just drop it here. So that's

our base. And the reason that I do this is to have a layer that shines through once we peel

back um the paint or we add some scratches so that metal that base metal shines through. So that looks pretty

good. And then I'm going to create another layer here. So let's just add a multi- channelannel layer here. And we

want to um influence the height here. Set maybe a height in the middle. That's that's for the paint. So we can always

subtract and add a bit more information. a roughness, metalness, and a normal layer. And the reason we need the normal

layer here is because you can see that the lower uh layer from the paint from the from from the metal is shining

through. So by if we don't want this, we can just enable normal and then fill it with the default normal, that blue

color, which just means it's a blank normal that's pointing outwards of the surface.

Yeah. Sorry to interrupt there, man. It sounds like we're having a little bit of some

uh technical issues where the stream is starting to lag a little bit for everyone. So uh just want to make sure

that we see your comments and uh if there's anyone uh who's in the office making sure that we have a strong

connection just want to give a little uh PSA there just to make sure that we have a clean connection for while we are uh

doing our stream. Yeah. And tell your colleagues in the office to maybe not use the upstream.

Stop stop sharing your files. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe maybe maybe chat can tell us

when the upstream is good so we know if we have to do some intervention here at the office.

But absolutely. Yeah, keep us keep us posted. I'm just looking at the chat as

you go along. Uh I didn't want to interrupt your flow there, but I want to make sure people can see uh all the

educational goodness that's going on here. Um so hopefully yeah hopefully the stream will will clear up a little bit

and uh I'll keep you posted. Maybe we can just continue otherwise. Perfect. Right, let's go back then.

Awesome. Yeah. So, we were just talking about how you're enabling channels, right? And

this is a little bit of a different behavior than what we had from uh you know, early access with Instamat, right?

Where now when you create uh new channels inside of layering projects, most of those channels are disabled by

default for performance. So, now that we're adding more things like the the normal channel, the roughness

individually, that gives us a little more control uh to tell in what specifically we need for each layer,

right? It's not just performance. It's also to to avoid injecting data into the composition that you don't really need

and then you have to figure out why does it look wrong now and you have to dial it back or disable the blend. So, it's

much easier to be able to control exactly if you want to, you know, add the base color or not. The this power

button is really helpful. But another frequent question is like how do you get the AO to render on the mesh? Right now,

you would have to add a new channel here. So, you can click add channel and simply add your AO channel and you can

see the AO information is coming in. But what we can also see is that um there's a contribution from the lower material

here. So to avoid this, we just add another fill layer here on our base. And you can see that this controls AO now.

But and then as usual, you can disable and enable AO in the viewport by clicking on the AO button. But even if

you don't do this, you can enable the rate tracing and and get a really beautiful render of your mesh as you as

you work. All right. So that's our paint layer. Let's pick a um color for this one.

Maybe like this. Let's um disable rate tracing again and just AO. Um

actually, let me desaturate this a bit more. Yeah, let's just use this. So, this is

our base paint. Then if you would have some some um mask on it, you would see the lower layer shine through. For

instance, if I would add a mask to this, that's a paint mask, a mesh mask painting. I could now, if I set this to

um subtract, I can now, you know, remove the details here. And you can see that we can see that lower material shining

through. And we get a nice um gradient where we can see that there's some thickness to the paint And you can

control the thickness now by modifying the height level of your paint base layer. So that controls the base

thickness of your of your paint. So is it very thick paint or is it more a thin layer of paint? I'll leave it like this

and remove my mask here. So um yeah. So let's add another layer here to mask off some of our parts here. So

that should be a metal layer. So I'll create a fill layer. And um because it's metal, I use just white for the most

part. And I'll add a metalness and roughness layer to this. And I'll increase the metalness to 100. So it's

metal. And what I want to do then is I want to mask off the parts that are actually metal. And the easiest way to

mask so we can pick the parts that we where we want to have our effect. And something again people ask often like

how can you control multiple? How how can you disable all of these at once? Do I have to click through? You actually

don't have to do that. You can just right click on the meshes here and then deselect all mesh meshes. But you could

also do something like just mask the ones that you want and then hit invert current selection. And you see it

inverts it perfectly. But you can also pick in the viewport. So these are the metal parts that we want to mask off

here. That looks pretty nice already. And um you always want to have some pattern, some theme going on on your

asset that should be consistent across all of the assets in your game world. What I want to do here is maybe add um

another color to separate those attachment points better. So I'll create another multi- channelannel layer. It's

going to be maybe let's take this bright yellow maybe a bit bit darker more saturation

like this. And again we're using the mesh mask. Deselect all. And for convenience I'll

hit the pick button. And then to pick more, I think I can hit shift and then I can just pick multiple times. And I

click in the onto the background to stop my picking. And you see it did a really nice job at picking our areas where we

do want to have this attachment color. So that looks pretty good. But then we would want to, you know, have that that

secondary color more visible on the mesh. And to to do this, I want to use a um volume mask to mask off some parts of

the mesh to just make it look a bit more interesting. So, I click them the add mask button here and I'll choose the

volume mask and it's set to multiply which means it combines with the lower with the lower mask. So, if I move my

volume uh away, let's move it a bit more up. You see that it only masks where you have this overlap between um the

previous mask, this one, and our volume. And we can control, you see there's a fall-off here, which is pretty good by

default. Having a bit of softness is always good to avoid aliasing. If your mask is too hard, it doesn't look as

nice. But we'll just dial this down to zero. And then we can control where we want our mask to be. But we don't want

it to multiply. We wanted to add to our mesh. And then I can hit R to scale down. And then move it down and maybe

mask off the the lower portion. Uh like this. And this is one of those masks that uses

the position uh bake data. Right. Exactly. If it's available. If it's not available, it's still going to work just

fine. But I would recommend you to have the position data available. And then I'll duplicate the mask here and just

move it to the top. And I'll mask off the top. Yeah, that already looks pretty cool.

And to make it just look a bit more custom, not so boring, I'll take the lower mask, hit E to enter the rotation

mode, and I'll rotate it a little bit and move it up just just slightly so it looks a bit more interesting.

And I think what's also nice is if you have a bit more separation when it comes to the roughness on your material. So

right now we have the same uh roughness all over the asset. And what I want to do here is maybe select that layer, fill

the roughness and have it a bit lower so it looks more like some glossy paint layer here. And you can see that already

looks interesting. And what you can do as well is add a bit of height information to to further separate um

the different layers. And you can see that this adds this very nice portion where the light reflects and adds us

very small very nice highlight. Nice. Actually, you see we we did have we have

one issue here and we masked the part here that we don't want to mask the metal part. And to fix this, we could

now create another mask and then so one way would be I'll just show it. I'll create a mask here again. Um, and we're

going to set it to subtract. And then I'll deselect. And then I pick my part here again. And it works. So, we

basically remove that metal part from our mask. But it it's much easier if you just have the right order in your

layering stack. So, in this case, I'll just move the metal part to the top and it's it's correct again. Actually, we

could make this a bit nicer if we add a a small volume mask. If you look here, we don't just have the the yellow paint

on on the top part. It's also on this um part behind this attachment point which I think would look a bit nicer if it

would actually be um green. So yeah, I was going to say you could use a

volume mask or you can even use one of our polygon selection masks as well to get more specific into that, you know,

inset area. That's a good point. I do like the volume mask. So I'll just use here and

then I'll set this one not to add. I'll set it to subtract. And you can see how our mask is now modifying the mesh. So,

I'll just move it over like this and then move it down a little bit to mask off that portion. And you see it

extends way too long. So, I'll just move it a bit forward. Hit F to focus. Again, F to focus. And

we masked out that portion. And um if we select it again, we could actually control the softness here if you want to

have a softer falloff here. Or we just perfectly, you know, shrink it down just a little bit so the the

bevel is nicely masked and then add a bit of softness to it. Yep. Like this.

Great. Nice. By the way, guys, if you have any questions, uh we're the stream seems to

be doing a bit better now with the with the buffering, so that's great to hear. If you guys have any questions at all

while we're uh doing any asset texturing or anything that Manfred's currently showing off, please feel free to ask.

It's always great to know what you guys are interested in. There's a lot of really cool techniques in here that

we're that we're looking at, especially being able to use the volume mask to cut out more complex shapes. A lot of times

people ask, you know, is it possible to create a custom volume to be able to texture assets? And a lot of times what

you could do is actually combine a lot of the primitives in the scene that we offer such as like the the cylinders or

the spheres uh the cubes to be able to cut out uh you know very distinct shapes using the volume mask that way.

Absolutely. So what should we do next here Jeremy? Well, it's looking pretty clean right

now. I'm wondering if we can roughen this up a little bit. Yeah, we could do that. But maybe

shouldn't we add a bit more details to it? I think we could add a decal for instance.

Yeah. I mean, we just added a whole bunch of decals into Instamat's library. Anywhere from sci-fi decals to kind of

liquid stains, stuff like that. Right. Right. Yeah. There's different ways. So,

let's show maybe one or two ways to do this. Um, I'll start off with the the way that I like most to be honest to add

a a bit of decaling to the mesh when it comes to just one or two big hero decals. If it's a lot, I would use the

the brush um and then just add um them by placing brush strokes all over the mesh. So, let's add another fill layer

here. And here's our fill layer. And how do we turn this into a decal if it's just a fill layer? Well, you could

change the projection type to be a decal. And then you can just project on your your decal this way. But I feel

like a better way is to just keep it on the default settings. And then instead what we're going to do, we keep the the

fill layer as is, but we add a mask and we're going to use the mesh projected mask, which is a really great mask for

many different reasons. And here you can see that now we have a a um a mask that is doing a triplaner projection. But

what we could do instead is switch that to decal. And then we can position and place our decal um using a mask. And the

benefit here to doing it this way is that you can still control your fill layer properties individually and and

mix it up as you would like to mix it up. Exactly. So this separates the content from the visibility on the on

the model. So you can always add more or less masks to this layer, but then you can choose, you know, what's the color,

what's the height or the the patterns and things like that, and then choose and then use the the decal as a mask

instead to separate that out and give you a little more control. Also allows you to go back and change

things, too. Yeah. And and what I want to do here is maybe do some embossing with this decal.

So to do this, I'll not just use the base color, I'll add my height. And as you see, if I increase it, you you get a

beautiful um outwards um shape here. But what I want to do is have that embossed in. So I'll just set it to subtract. And

you can see how that adds my um decal. And I can perfectly control how that um decal is then being applied.

So maybe like this. And maybe also change the roughness. Make it a bit more rough here. Um that looks pretty nice.

And then maybe just blend the base color in a little bit so it look it has more of an embossed look just like this. But

as Jeremy mentioned, there's more you could do here now. For instance, you could um add a filter to your mask and

then warp it. That's something with you can do with the new build. For instance, I could use a um

a uh what do we want to use here? Maybe a slow blur. Yeah, we can roughen up the edges there

from the inset. Yeah. So you can see here's our slope blur doing its magic. We can use a

different um noise if that is not doing what we want. So it's a bit too low. The frequency of the noise is a bit too low.

We want to have a very fine noise. So I'm going to um pick a noise that does what I want to do. Maybe take um I think

a clouds noise could work here. Maybe clouds. Clouds heavy.

The turbulent one or the clouds heavy. Yeah, that's one too. And that's way too intense. So we can we

can blur the noise a little bit. And the intensity would have to be very very low. So I'll just set it to something

like maybe 2%. And you can see how that now makes our embossing a bit more interesting. And you can control how

that um works. The maximum or the minimum blend to um create a effect where the the outside part is being

blurred into the emboss part or where you just break up the edges by doing a maximum blend because now it just only

goes outward. So that looks more plausible. Like this part here for instance looks a bit like you have a

wornoff edge now where something rubbed off against it. And again you can even make that finer by um lowering the blur.

So this is a very powerful tool to create a very beautiful um looking decal. So if you look at this now

compared to what we had without the slow blur. So this is super clean but it already looks a bit worn off. And then

you can control exactly how intense, how that should be using the the blur on the input noise, which is a very nice

feature to better dial that in perfectly just like this. Yeah. And then if you wanted to change

the color or how much the the uh logo subtracts in from the surface because we separated that masking out from the

actual layer itself, you can always go back and nondestructively change that information.

Absolutely. And that's a great feature. I I love when things are non-destructive. So you see I can change

the blend mode and I can modify the height here and everything would just work based on the masks we created.

Something also worth mentioning is uh you're subtracting height information from the surface of the of the mesh. And

so a lot of times people ask you know how can I have negative uh depth in this case? How do I dive into the surface of

a mesh? Uh maybe you can talk a little bit about how that works in instat. I mean like we did it here right? You

just set it to subtract and then you can just dial it in the way that you won't want. And even the because because we

set the height to use 16 bit FR which means full range which means it's you're not limited to set up your effect

between zero and one. You can actually go negative very far negative or very far into the positive. And then there's

a more advanced feature we added for some of the more advanced um users is that you can actually if you right click

here on the height you can actually enter a value that's not just between zero and one. You can set it to 10. And

you can see the effect is now much stronger. So you get you basically subtract 50

units into the mesh here. Very cool. And so Instant behind the scenes is uh

not only generating a height map, but it's using the height map information to generate the normal data. Right.

Exactly. That that's the beauty of the this height workflow that um you can easily author beautiful normal details,

but you don't have to struggle with the complexity of vectors and and this kind of authoring and and your decals and

alphas don't have to be normals. You can just use a regular height map and then drive your normals that way. And again,

we can we can still move this around, right? It's it's non-destructive. We can still move this, rotate it, and scale

it, and do whatever we want with this layer here. Yeah, we got a a question or a

suggestion uh just from the chat. Uh they're really interested in looking at uh you know, how we were adding layer

references to uh with the latest release. You know, how we're able to reference information. We're kind of

going into that a little bit with our effects with masks, but I figured I'd bring it up in case you were planning on

showing that a little bit later. But there's people interested in looking at how we're using uh you know ref layer

references and also adding you know grunges to layers and things like that. Actually the second part there adding

grunges to layers. Uh one thing we don't show that often is using something like a generator uh and how generators work.

Maybe we can talk a little about how those work. Yeah. Yeah. Actually I forgot this.

That's a really important part. When you build a surface even a plastic is not as perfect as this. So your your plastic

ones needs to have some micro variation micro detail. And that's where the generator comes in. For instance, if we

go to the to the paint layer, I can use a generator here to add a bit of detail. So, I'll spawn a generator by clicking

this button. And then I use a noise um that works well for me. And in this case, I want to have something like a

pearlin noise, just a lot of dots and smooth frequencies. Uh it's right here. And you see this now affects any of the

channels that we enable here. Right now, it was affecting the ambient occlusion channel because we had it enabled up

here. So up here you can select the default influence and in other tools you wouldn't always need to switch between

the different channels to modify the blend mode. But in instamat you typically just have this on base color

and you're you're good to go because you have that beautiful um layer stack where you can control whatever you you know

what data you generate or composite here. Plus you can always have access to all of the different blend modes. So you

don't need it that often. But in this case, it it controls what your default influence for the generator is. And what

we want to do here is add some micro detail. So I'm going to go to that generator and increase the scale of my

of my noise here. Um, actually that should be way denser. So we can control that. We're not

limited to going to the range we see here. We can hit the edit button and maybe go for a scale like 120 or we

could even go to 140. And um we can control the gamma maybe like this. And then we can choose

what we do with our generator. If we go back to the to the blend settings here and

um let's see what we do here. Maybe soft light. And then just you want to have very very tiny influences here. Actually

maybe let's use a different noise. I think what might be better here is maybe the dense noise. And again, let's

let's crank that up so we can actually see it. And increase the scale of our noise function way higher.

We need more. We need way more. Maybe like this. And again, we go back and just decrease

the blend very, very low. So, I don't know if you guys can see this on the stream, but we have very, very light,

very small details here on our paint. I don't know if you guys can see that if I zoom in like this, but there's some

shading differences here. But that that's what makes your asset look much better when you look at the whole the

total of the asset. And also what you can use it for is to maybe add just a tiny bit of influence to um the

roughness map. And here what might be interesting to use is add subtract. So what add subtract does is it blends two

things together and some part will be added and some part will be subtracted. And basically the values that are below

the midpoint of 0.5 will be subtracted and the values that are above will be added. That's interesting to not just

add variation in one direction to your roughness map, but both in the positive and in the negative. So let's use add

subtract here. And then if we crank this all the way up, you can see what I'm saying here that some parts will get

more glossy while other parts will get more rough. So if we look at the roughness map in detail, you can see

exactly how that works. So if I would only have add here, everything would get brighter. If I have only subtract here,

everything would only get darker. But add subtract allows you to go into both directions. So, it's a very nice feature

to perfectly dial in just some some imperfections here on the surface. And so, generators are uh really really

really cool. I mean, I don't think they get as much love as they deserve. You know, um being able to add information

to a layer and being able to composite it into the different channels in this kind of layer stack manner is is a

really cool way of working, especially for that micro detail that you're talking about. So, if you have a grunge

or some kind of element that's supplying image information, and then you kind of want it to uh push out the height a

little bit or or adjust the color a little bit, you want you want to kind of inject that that image information, a

texture into the layer that you're working on somehow and blending it with a specific blending mode, you can do so

uh very quickly just by using a generator. You don't need to kind of add multiple layers to the layer stack to

get that done. It's a It's a nice way to be able to just bring in some additional information into that one layer and and

you can have it in that effect stack from that one layer in the stack. Absolutely. I I love it for these these

micro details like to add some roughness um variation to add some color variation. It's perfect for this. And

keep in mind you have other blend modes. You don't have to use the soft um soft light. You can even use something like U

or um luminance to modify um exactly how you're doing the blend, how you want to add that um um variation to your mesh.

All right, so we have some variation here with the generator. I hope that helped the chat to understand how it

works and you guys can carry that knowledge forward for me. That would be fantastic.

Absolutely. I think we also have a YouTube video on generators as well. Even in uh use for something like

material layering when you're authoring your own materials using the layering system. Generators are a great way to

add micro detail that way. Yeah. And what you should do as well is just make sure your layer stack looks

nice and clean. So make sure to just double click it and then name your layers. Otherwise you add if you have a

big project it will be difficult to find what you're doing. So this is our our metal

uh attachments and handles. And what do we have here? Um, this is our uh mat embossing. It's this guy right here. Um,

right. And then we should probably group this. And then just hit um command or control

G to create a nice group. And all of our um layers are now here. And I'll call that the paint layer. So if I hide this,

everything is gone. And what another more important thing that people often forget is you want to

have some some weathering on the asset if it's an outdoor asset. And in this case, what I often used to do for my

asset assets is to add some kind of a sun bleaching to the asset to make it look a bit more worn out. And that's

also very easy to do in Instamat. So I'll add a layer here. Um, and we just want to control um the base color. And

what I'm doing here is adding a mask next. And to to fake that radiation on the surface, which is like sun hitting

the top of it, I'll add a um mask that's called the mesh direction mask. So I'll search for direction and I'll find it

here, the mesh direction mask. Double click it. And you can see you can now control exactly where how your mask

works. So if I'll just solo that mask, right click and solo. Um, you can see it influenc It creates a really nice mask

that hits it from the top or you can hit the the asset a bit from the front so it looks like you're burning you're you're

burning in that that light here. And you can if you just want to have the top or maybe the front a little bit. You can

control how that is being integrated as a mask by using the gamma to control the falloff to create a more plausible

fall-off for your for your asset. And then I unsolo unsolo this one. And again, I'll use the soft light

to blend it in a little bit. And I don't know if you guys can see that, but it just illuminates it a little bit.

Maybe we should change those fine details, right? Yeah, exactly.

It's like it's just the things that you kind of feel, you know, not necessar necessarily see. And uh there was

actually since you were showing that for like the light direction and the sun direction, we just added a light uh

baked light mask into uh this mask as well. I think is another great use case for adding that kind of bakedin

sunlight. Absolutely. For for sunlight or if you do a stylized asset where do you want to

have a specific light direction baked in. It's a perfect use for this. Right. Right. So we have

we actually have a question by the way. Um since uh since we were talking recently about generators uh someone's

asking you know how do filters and generators function with layer groups and so how can we uh utilize the power

of groups to be able to uh take advantage of filters and generators in a very procedural way.

Yeah, that's one of the great features of Instamat is that you can actually put a filter on a group that something other

tools can't do. And I love it for doing design reviews. So you can create a filter and for instance the HSL or I

prefer actually the HCL. Um you can just apply that to your whole group and then you can look at your asset in different

color variations and do a design review or maybe just explore how would it look like if I just actually I like this for

instance if you just shift the U a little bit to the right. The green looks a bit more interesting.

Modify the chroma desaturate it a bit or add more saturation to it. So this is one of the great features of Instamat to

be able to put a filter on a whole group. And you can create multiple versions of

these HDL or HSL filters and just switch between them to see which variation you like.

Exactly. So, um, let's rotate this one a little bit. And then I'll duplicate this guy. And then I'll move it back. Um,

maybe do an HDL like this. And you see now we have, if you look at our layer stack, we have this duplicated one

that's enabled and the low one is disabled. You see that it's grayed out a little bit. And it also has that that um

box here, that empty box which shows that it's disabled. And if I select both of those and I hit H, you actually

toggle between them. You see now it shifts the the box up and down as I hit H to hide um the layer. So this is a

great way to AB test your filter to see which one you actually like better. Nice. And just another question from

another uh another person in the chat. uh kind of a generalized the question. So he's asking how do these workflows um

affect other project types like uden based uh you know projects or maybe you know uh multimaterial unified you know

so we he's specifically asking you know how do we add decals to surfaces in the UDM workflow but you know in terms of

everything else that we're talking about uh you know I think it all applies you know how does this uh change using those

different type of you know mesh configurations absolutely that's the beauty of instamat

and that's the beauty of this multimaterial uni unified workflow And also the UDM workflow is that everything

what you see here will just work natively and you'll be able to apply a decal that goes over many different UDM

tiles or many different materials if you use the multimaterial unified mode. Right? So so when you're in a unified

workflow with Instamat it should just honestly it should just work. You can add a decal, you can add a projection

mask and then you should be able to apply it on the the surface just like we're doing here.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean there's a lot of great things you can do here, right? You can

use filters to invert your colors or you can use filters to um to apply curves or color match some specific layer to apply

a levels. And the great thing is the filter you can always target a specific channel. For instance, you can target

base color here or you can target your um roughness map and then maybe tweak how your roughness map actually looks

like if you feel like oh you you overdid it a bit and you need to dial it down a bit. So you can dial down all of the

roughness maps that are inside of that layer group using just a single filter on your group. A very beautiful feature.

I think that that also brings up a great question, you know, uh what distinguishes a filter from a generator

from an effect, right? And so I think that was one of the main uh different uh uh aspects there was a filter is

designed to control one specific channel in a layer group, right? whereas an effect is able to generate and

manipulate multiple channels at the same time of a single layer. Absolutely. A good example for this is

for instance if we um let's bring in a or maybe just disable this guy right here. So go back to our base layer and

if I would apply a filter here like a um swirl. Let's see. Do we have the swirl or what can we do here? Um the shape

mapper sharpen um what's the most visible I guess? H

actually maybe just use emboss highlight. So if you would apply a filter like this, it doesn't make a lot

of sense. Let's use color match here. Yeah. So if you applied a color match, it would just target one channel. But if

you want to do something that modifies multiple channels at once, like a swirl, you could use a um a effect. So if I

apply a blur or um what do we want to apply here? A mesh blur, for instance. Um, we could then control all of the

channels at once. So now we don't just blur the base color. If we look at the roughness here, we will blur the

roughness. We will blur the metalness and all of our channels. So that's what an effect is doing if you want to modify

all of your channels. But I think actually, shouldn't we have the swirl here?

I think that Yeah. Isn't that one of the ones that you that I come up?

Yeah. Great. Yeah. So you see the swirl is now swirling all of our material at once. So

you don't have to swirl each channel differently or actually not differently but independently. And then also make

sure your settings always apply. So this this is a very nice way to to do it. And we also work on adding more specific uh

effects like for instance the the material not this one. Let me see.

Yeah, this is the one. Right. So, for instance, this effect applies a paint layer to your um existing material and

now you can control how the paint looks, how much paint you have on it. So, these effects are actually very powerful and

we're going to add way more effects to to the library. Right now, we have a few of them. I think the the the paint

effect is a really great one if you have a base surface like a wood for instance. If I let's just add a wood material. I

think that that looks a bit more interesting. If we take a a um nice wood like this one and we apply it to our

mesh. And by the way, you can drag and drop those filters and effect. So I can just

drag and drop my effect onto this. And you see it works. Now I have a a material that's normally very difficult

to do, which is a um wood material that has some paint on top of it. And we can change the the color here of our paint.

And we can control the the the thickness of our material, the chipping, the aging of the the paint and have you we have a

lot of control over the all of the peeling effects here. So more peeling. You see now it peels more. You can

control the roughness of your paint layer, make it more glossy like thick paint. If we add a lot of the peeling,

it looks like thick paint. And if we have very little of the peeling, it looks more like a thinner layer of

paint. Chipping and cracks. there's a lot of control you have over that particular um

effect. So you see now we have all of these cracks. So it looks like very very old paint. It's a beautiful filter.

And there's more we're going to add here. It's actually funny. Someone was just

asking, you know, they're mainly looking to ask about reference layers, but they were just asking how we could create a

peeling effect, and we just so happened to do that right away. So that's pretty cool. Of course, you can do a few

peeling effects with uh layer references and very specific things like that, but you can also just easily drag on a paint

effect like that uh as Manford just mentioned. And uh we do have a question regarding uh how these uh effects work.

Uh so one person's asking, you know, how are we able to choose our own noises or use our own custom nodes and use those

as effects and layering? We'll look at this later if we still have time. I think we're already one

hour in. I I wanted to show so many things. Let's see if we can get to it and then I'll show you guys how we could

build um our custom node using the atom graph and then use it as a filter in the in the layering workflow. That's

something that I wanted to do actually. But let's see how far we get. And if if we don't do it today, then guys, tune in

next week. We're going to do another live stream if if it checks out, if nobody gets sick, and then we can