Stylized Environment Substances

Zack Maxwell

I'm working on a pack of substance textures for a stylized environment. Once it's done, I'll be putting it all up on Gumroad.
So far, I've finished the grass.


It actually wasn't that difficult to make, once I finally nailed down the style I wanted to achieve. THAT part was rough.

Zack Maxwell

Tried turning it into a PBR material. Better or worse? I think I like it, and it better leverages the power of SD. Couldn't do this by hand.

Fishypants

Thats pretty cool man, keep up the good work. Would love to see the other materials once you finish them.

Zack Maxwell

Oh God, it took so much effort to figure out what style to go with here. But I finally have it, the dirt material. I'm sure I'll continue to tweak it still; I'm not completely satisfied with it.

Cremuss

Interesting thread! I've wanted to get my hands on substance designer for a while and since I'm into handpainted style a lot, I was always curious to see what the software could achieve in this area and it looks like it has decent potentiel ! I like the grass (maybe the pbr a bit less due to the white specular?) and the rock texture is looking good as well. Maybe the dirt is slightly too noisy though ? I'd say it's between realistic and stylized right now.

Zack Maxwell

Cremuss said:

Interesting thread! I've wanted to get my hands on substance designer for a while and since I'm into handpainted style a lot, I was always curious to see what the software could achieve in this area and it looks like it has decent potentiel ! I like the grass (maybe the pbr a bit less due to the white specular?) and the rock texture is looking good as well. Maybe the dirt is slightly too noisy though ? I'd say it's between realistic and stylized right now.

That was my thought as well. It has too much high-frequency detail relative to the grass.

Zack Maxwell

Hm... I have the stone material now, for cliff sides and such. Not sure how I feel about it.

I have a couple versions to show. The first feels a bit muddy, but the second feels too obviously lumped together.

I'm not impressed with either. This is something I definitely would have preferred to sculpt were I not deliberately aiming to do everything in Substance Designer.

Zack Maxwell

Made some finer rubble. Turned out much better, I think. I'll try making the stone from before look more like it.

Eric Chadwick

These look cool! It would be nice to see more intersection treatment, to prevent it from looking like a random-interpenetration-scatter kind of thing.

Zack Maxwell

Eric Chadwick said:

These look cool! It would be nice to see more intersection treatment, to prevent it from looking like a random-interpenetration-scatter kind of thing.

Thanks. I was kinda thinking that too, I'm just not certain how to go about doing it.

Zack Maxwell

I've tweaked the rubble to try reducing interpenetration.

Eric Chadwick

Ooh that's nice. I wonder if there's a way to break up straight lines, introduce a bit more of that wiggly hand-painted-ness.

Zack Maxwell

Eric Chadwick said:

Ooh that's nice. I wonder if there's a way to break up straight lines, introduce a bit more of that wiggly hand-painted-ness.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a good method for achieving that without making everything look really messy. I'll keep trying though.

Zack Maxwell

My new attempt at the grass and stone. The stone is stiiiiill a little off.

Zack Maxwell

I now have water as well.

Agilethief

Looking great man, I'd love to see some of your graphs.
I think the grass looks pretty mown atm, dunno if that's what you're going for but the hard chopped off edges at the top make it seem like it's been trimmed xD
I would imagine wild grass would grow a bit more erratically and thus spikey.

I like the water, looks good, often water only really works when in motion so it's nice to see you've captured the ripples of it.

Are you using POM with a height map to add depth? What outputs do these substances have?

Zack Maxwell

I'm not sure what you mean by POM. If you're referring to height displacement, I only did that with the water.

The rest are all Color/Normal/Roughness/Metallic.

My basic workflow has been to create a height map, generate a normal from it, pull curvature and lighting from that and blend it back into the height, then add simple colors through a gradient. Roughness is usually made by inverting the pre-normal height map and adjusting the levels, ensuring that light plays more on the prominent areas, and avoids shadowed areas, giving a better sense of depth.

ActionDawg

POM is Parallax Occlusion Mapping, a technique that fakes a displacement effect in the pixel shader instead of doing actual geo displacement. Substance uses it by default when you have a height output with the OpenGL renderer.

IMO, using an AO map would help these. With many PBR type game engines it lets the light get into those cracks for direct light but occludes the indirect light which is I feel gives a more refined look than removing it through roughness alone.

Zack Maxwell

Grimwolf said:

I'm not sure what you mean by POM. If you're referring to height displacement, I only did that with the water.

The rest are all Color/Normal/Roughness/Metallic.

My basic workflow has been to create a height map, generate a normal from it, pull curvature and lighting from that and blend it back into the height, then add simple colors through a gradient. Roughness is usually made by inverting the pre-normal height map and adjusting the levels.

Hm... I added an ambient occlusion map, but the difference is very minor. I'm not sure about keeping it. It only seems to be adding extra contrast to shadowed sections.

I did realize though that by adding a small amount of metallic value, the specular takes on a portion of the Base Color. Looks awesome on the grass, I think.

ActionDawg

Yes that is the effect of the AO map.

Zack Maxwell

I merged the AO into the alpha channel of the roughness, so even if the benefit is small, I don't think I'll lose much by having it.

It is an improvement. Thanks.

I've made some fallen leaves now as well. Close to finished. Bit too much specularity, maybe?

Ged

I really like your progress with the stone and water, leaves look a bit too bumpy yeah, could do with a subtle dirt pass across them as well.

Uberren

Very interesting stuff, will be following this.

Meloncov

I really love most of these, but the leaves aren't reading well for me. I think they look too rounded; my first thought was it was a pile of coffee beans.

Grusti

I like this style and if you give us more in depth info about substance graphs it wood be great!

admrodrigotm

GRASS: I agree with Agilethief about it. The texture is great, but to use in backyards and gardens. If you want a grass to put in a wild environment, maybe them should be more randomized in shape and color.

STONE: Almost everything is awesome here. The colors, lights and shadows are really cool. Just some details seens a little strange to me. Some details that are crossing different stones. (See the image)

RUBBLE: Really good!

WATER: AWESOME! I would like to see it in an environment.

FALLEN LEAVES: They are too uniform. Looks like they are different just in their size and color. Maybe you should put less leaves to allow some ground to appear too.

It would be good if you mention what do you expect whit each texture, because a texture could be awesome in a situation but could be uselles in another situation.

That fallen leaves, for example. They are dark, so they should be ok in a dense forest, but not in a garden.

Well, this is my first contact in Polycount forum.

I hope my feedback could be useful and sorry for any english mistake. It's not my native language.

Zack Maxwell

Thanks for the advice.

admrodrigotm said:

GRASS: I agree with Agilethief about it. The texture is great, but to use in backyards and gardens. If you want a grass to put in a wild environment, maybe them should be more randomized in shape and color.

I can see that being an issue. I've made some attempts to change the flat ends already, but I haven't gotten a good result yet.

admrodrigotm said:

STONE: Almost everything is awesome here. The colors, lights and shadows are really cool. Just some details seens a little strange to me. Some details that are crossing different stones. (See the image)

I think the problem is more that it has sharp lines creating distinct pieces in the material. It's actually supposed to be all one solid piece. But as you might've seen in the first couple screenshots of it, I'm not having an easy time correcting that.

admrodrigotm said:

WATER: AWESOME! I would like to see it in an environment.

I have my doubts about this material. It looks good static, like in the screenshot. But I'm having a very difficult time figuring out how to animate it effectively in-engine, because of the Base Color details. It could easily end up needing 8+ texture maps.

admrodrigotm said:

FALLEN LEAVES: They are too uniform. Looks like they are different just in their size and color. Maybe you should put less leaves to allow some ground to appear too.

I agree. I'm planning to add random holes in the leaves, and leaving open patches is a good idea. I'm not sure if simply using an alpha channel for that would work in a layered landscape material. I'll have to try it.

As for the setting, I'm making all of these to be used in a forest.

IlyaIvanovArt said:

I like this style and if you give us more in depth info about substance graphs it wood be great!

I'm making these with the intention of selling them on Gumroad, as well as the Unity and UE4 marketplaces. The Gumroad version will have the full .SBS, so it'll be possible to look over the full graphs directly and modify them.

Zack Maxwell

I've made some heavy changes to the dirt material. It really needed it.

Zack Maxwell

Aw, hell. I was planning to put out the complete pack of materials out all at once. Looking at Gumroad though, it seems like common practice is to sell them individually. That makes things easier.

Instead of jumping around like I've been, I'll try to polish them one at a time and release them individually.

I think the grass looks the best, so I'll try to do that one first. I'm going to try giving it pointed ends, instead of the choppy ones it has now.
I may even release the current version as-is as "lawn" grass, and work on a secondary version.

I'll take any suggestions people have on which ones they'd like to see me finish up next.

For now, here's the new progress I've made on the rubble.

Zack Maxwell

Well... Did anyone here know that if you accidentally remove a graph in Substance Designer, you can't undo or restore it, and it simultaneously saves? I didn't.
Now I do, and the rubble and stone are gone (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Ged

ah that sucks! youve still got the outputted textures though right? live and learn I guess 

Robert Berrier

Very cool!
A flat-shaded render would also be awesome!

oblomov

There should be a . autosave directory next to your sbs file in which you can find older states of your substance, so maybe you can salvage what you lost. Also I don't think SD is supposed to save automatically when you remove a graph, at least I have not been able to reproduce it. If you can, would it be possible to file a bug report with reproduction steps ?

Zack Maxwell

oblomov said:

There should be a . autosave directory next to your sbs file in which you can find older states of your substance, so maybe you can salvage what you lost. Also I don't think SD is supposed to save automatically when you remove a graph, at least I have not been able to reproduce it. If you can, would it be possible to file a bug report with reproduction steps ?

It might have been because I exported a separate version. I had 3 graphs in the same project, so I tried deleting two, then exporting it as a separate project. Hitting undo afterward didn't work though, and when I closed it and opened the original .sbs, that one had been saved as well as the new one.
Autosave is gone too, because apparently it saves every 10 minutes even if the program is minimized, and I wasn't aware of it until you mentioned it : /
Leave it minimized for one hour, and your history is gone.

Hopefully it won't be too bad though. I hated the stone anyway, and the rubble wasn't too hard to make.

Kushy

Grimwolf said:

I now have water as well.

The water looks really awesome man, love it! Would be really cool to see your graph or get some tips on how you made it  

Zack Maxwell

Oh man. I was working on the new, sharper grass blades, and stumbled on an incredibly sexy stylized fur material. I'm going to try turning it into a Smart Material with customizable parameters.

Zack Maxwell

Kushy said:
The water looks really awesome man, love it! Would be really cool to see your graph or get some tips on how you made it  

Actually, here's a link to it. It isn't finished anyway, and the file will be much easier to understand than an image.

Zack Maxwell

Workin' on wood. I really like where it's going, but I think I need to scale it down and add some moss.

tomenjerry

@Grimwolf Hey man really like where this is going! It's a unique style, which reminds me of heroes of the storm (as you mentioned). I think the amount of specular on the dirt is just right. Wood tends to be veru rough too, so maybe have the same amount of spec? I also think you should try to bring more longer shapes into the wood, now it almost looks like rock. I have never used sunstance before, but judging from your textures so far, you should be able to do so. good work! I love the style

Zack Maxwell

Improvement? I scaled down the details, toned down the influence of metallic and roughness, and added some extra knots. I also tried to make it a little less broken up and lengthen the strips. Concerned it might be a little too noisy though.

I still need to try adding on some moss.

Zack Maxwell

Wow, the Moss parameter turned out amazing.

tomenjerry

@Grimwolf Look better! (I think), moss looks cool too

Ged

very nice work on this latest one, why not show it on a tree stump or something? that would show off how it would look on an asset

Zack Maxwell

Ged said:

very nice work on this latest one, why not show it on a tree stump or something? that would show off how it would look on an asset

Here's an image of it on a cylinder.

Zack Maxwell

I made another improvement on the grass. It was mostly a lot of little changes, but I also set up custom parameters and cleaned up the graph.

Ged

yeah that looks cool on a cylinder! I think the grass could do with a bit of colour variation, just a little to break it up like a littl of the grass is old and most is new fresh grass?

Zack Maxwell

Working on some stylized mushrooms now. No highpoly used.

Zack Maxwell

I've finalized the mushrooms.



All using the same substance.
My Artstation profile has it available as a Marmoset Viewer scene as well.

Zack Maxwell

I think I'm going to create an Alice in Wonderland themed environment, using those mushrooms scaled up as trees. So to do that, I think I'll re-create my stone material next, then create some rocks and bushes.

Zack Maxwell

Well, as I thought. The stone is turning out a lot better this time. I don't feel bad about losing the old one anymore.

Zack Maxwell

I decided I actually would make some trees for the forest environment. I'm still not satisfied with this one, but I've been at it for daaays... Figuring out exactly what I want to do with it has not been easy.