I was interested in a short on Instagram where a user of Substance Painter was using the default test object and appeared to ‘paint’ actual tape on the surface of the object. I was intrigued with the problem of how they arrived at that.
I did some thinking and realized maybe a way to do it in Cycles would be to use Modifiers and Textures to fake the same thing.
I started with a Suzanne and then made a duplicate to use as my revealed surface mesh. I set that to have zero alpha and set up a subsurface modifier and a shrinkwrap modifier. I had originally thought to use a Displacement modifier, but the pointy protrusions left me frustrated so I went to the shader for the surface to add a displacement texture there to fake the scrunchiness. I used a simple noise to give a surface texture bump and I used a simple 2k black image texture to paint to plugged into the alpha of the shader.
I think it works pretty well, enough to be worth sharing here so someone might consider other methods for the same thing. I’m not saying that users don’t need SP now, but I am saying that there are ways around the odd obstacle with the right thinking.
