totally random texture thread

    Looks great man! Dumb question from someone who never used substance: Did you create the height map in substance too or was that imported from a bake or something?

    Quote from Steppenwolf

    1 hour ago, Steppenwolf said: I started learning Substance Designer few weeks ago after being super hesitant for a long time. I always thought it wouldn't feel like proper art making but now i'm loving it. This is one of my first attempts at a proper Substance, all procedural:

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/bjsP7OR.jpg]

    That looks phenomenal!

    Quote from Minos

    55 minutes ago, Minos said: Looks great man! Dumb question from someone who never used substance: Did you create the height map in substance too or was that imported from a bake or something?

    Everything created in Substance! You can bring in external height maps tho. It's super flexible. But then you limit yourself with the options you have for tweaking. The cool thing about SD is that once you have made the Substance you can get virtualy unlimited variations out of it by just playing with some parameters. Making these roof tiles took me maybe 6-8 hours but now i can make a way different roof tile material in just a couple seconds or minutes.

    Nice one man, looks great.


    SD is an incredible piece of software; you should all try it out and try to get proficient at it. I think most companies will be moving towards using it, it speeds up your workflow so much.

    Yea it's becoming an industry standard and prerequisite for env artists quickly and if there was any doubt left about its usefulness then Uncharted 4 has evaporated that.

    What surprised me most is how much you can still apply your "oldschool" art knowledge to it. I thought it would be much harder to get results out of it that don't look super procedural but when you know how to use colors and large, medium, small scale details, break up repetition etc. in tradionational workflows then you can just do the same in SD.

    Quote from Puddy

    1 hour ago, Puddy said: Can someone ELI5 to me what this means? :D

    It means the material is entirely scripted via a set of node based, parameter driven noises, filters and shapes instead of using traditional methods like using photo sources, hipoly sculpts etc. The advantage of this over the traditional methods is that i can make wild variations very easily later on by just playing with some sliders instead of having to go back to square A, rearranging stuff in zbrush, rebaking maps and so on.

    This is what the graph looks like:

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/qXpUFW8.jpg]

    Looks complicated, right? But it actualy isn't because you start very simple and add layer upon layer of detail, not too different from what you would do in zbrush and photoshop.

    In this case i started with a simple square shape down in the left corner, tweaked the side dimensions, added some beveling and then fed it into a tile generator with some randomized values for depth and position of each plank. In the next step i added some edge trimming like one would do in zbrush. Then i used some shapes and filters to create wood patterns, mixed, blended, copy pasted, tweaked etc. to make it look more convincing and natural. Then i added some smaller details like dirt and little holes.

    After that i create some masks from some of the layers, details, aswell as cavity and curvature nodes. Those are used to feed into gradients and mixed and blended like in Photoshop to get a color texture. Last step then to create a roughness map. Again very similar to what oine would do in Photoshop.

    Sounds awesome! I'm one of those filthy designers who don't stay on top of these things....

    Thanks for the breakdown!

    Yes substance designer is fucking fun to use, good for pbr since you get a perfect albedo from it. If you don't want to start from scratch you can use a height, normal and color from zbrush etc and go from there. That said, I think there is a problem where a lot of substance materials still have that procedural look to them. Good reference is a must as always :)

    Quote from Pampers

    12 hours ago, Pampers said: That said, I think there is a problem where a lot of substance materials still have that procedural look to them. Good reference is a must as always :)

    Notice this aswell, but imo that isn't an issue with the software but with who's using it. It's used by a lot of early adopters who arn't really artists per se. The biggest beginner mistakes that i see people do is to apply noises and filters uniformly. My personal mantra is masking, masking and more masking, and then masking of masks. When working with SD you need to hop onto every opportunity to break up repeating patterns and uniformity, both for shape and colors.

    Ther's also an incredible amount of untapped potential in the software that nobody did a tutorial for yet or scripted some nodes for. That said the future looks really bright for Substance Designer in my opinion. The software is already super powerful and will only get better from here and more proper talented artists will hop onto it now that the Uncharted 4 and Rainbow 6 environment teams made a strong case for it. It will also play super well with when Quixel finaly releases their megascans. In SD you can mix and reshuffle them, extract details or albedo gradients for your Substances etc.

    Quote from Steppenwolf

    On 6/3/2016 at 1:25 PM, Steppenwolf said: Ther's also an incredible amount of untapped potential in the software that nobody did a tutorial for yet or scripted some nodes for. That said the future looks really bright for Substance Designer in my opinion.

    Yeah, I have seen so many amazing results and most of these are without relying on any of the more `advanced` features like fx-maps or function graphs. @Steppenwolf and @PogoP, your materials look fantastic. Would you be interested in sharing interesting excerpts from the graphs (creating a specific pattern, how you handle height control of certain elements, etc)? I can't imagine I would be the only one interested in this, but maybe it's a bit cheeky to ask ;)

    Oh man, it's good to see other people here playing with substance. I finally caved and started getting into it a bit over 2 months ago, after eyeing it cautiously from a distance for a while. I think I've developed some kind of addiction now. This is the first one I've finished that I really feel is worth showing off though, everything generated inside Substance Designer.

    [Blocked Image: http://imgur.com/5jbcOwq.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://imgur.com/92P0RxB.jpg]

    It's got a pretty hefty graph. I guess it is essentially 2 substances combined though between the rock and the foliage.

    [Blocked Image: http://imgur.com/sLkIvrl.jpg]

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