Substance! Where do I start?!
polycounter lvl 8
So it's about time I get into Substance, and in particular Substance Designer!
On first glance it looks like a hell of a lot to take in and it would be great to start off in the right direction and waste as little time as possible getting off the ground with the basics of building materials.
So where do I Start?!
- What are the best tutorials to look at? I know Allegorithmic have a few on their Youtube which I'm going to start looking at asap but are there other well known people of the community?
- Is there a good resource of pre-build substances? It would be great to get some open and have a good browse of the masks and figure out how they are put together.
- If you could tell your past self a bunch of tips, What to avoid, what is a waste of time, how to speed up work flows etc What would you say?
Thanks in advance for any tips, tricks and advice!
On first glance it looks like a hell of a lot to take in and it would be great to start off in the right direction and waste as little time as possible getting off the ground with the basics of building materials.
So where do I Start?!
- What are the best tutorials to look at? I know Allegorithmic have a few on their Youtube which I'm going to start looking at asap but are there other well known people of the community?
- Is there a good resource of pre-build substances? It would be great to get some open and have a good browse of the masks and figure out how they are put together.
- If you could tell your past self a bunch of tips, What to avoid, what is a waste of time, how to speed up work flows etc What would you say?
Thanks in advance for any tips, tricks and advice!
Replies
Here's some of the best videos for beginners I've found:
These should get you going in the right direction
But for pre-built reference, just check substance share. https://share.allegorithmic.com/
.sbs files are graph files for substance designer, so you create those within the software. if you have an .sbs file are you need to do is open substance designer and file>open file and browse to your .sbs file.
Basic things to never forget: Always use reference, work in the big shapes first then the details, and experiment with different nodes and things you haven't tried! The best way to learn designer is just to jump in and start creating!
Just let me know if you need anything else!
You can download Substances on Substance Share and check out the graphs to learn from them.
I would remind my beginner self that there is a sharpen node in Substance.
As far as speeding up your workflow:
1) make a template with all the outputs you need for whatever engine you work with so you don't have to do it over and over again when you start a new substance
2) make generators that you can reuse for things like stones, pebbles, wood chips, leaves etc.
3) working in Substance you come across many happy little accidents that could be useful later on. copy paste them into an extra file for later reference.
In terms of .sbs files, I'm looking at the effect's and grudge maps (https://share.allegorithmic.com/libraries/586) are you not able to get these imported into the general source files and filters already present in substance.
There looks like there is a lot of useful filters, effects and grudge/noise maps that I'd like to include and bulk out the libary, its not a great work flow having to import an effect every time I want to add it to my graph.
Thanks!
@StormyBA if you have any questions I run a discord for art education goodness
Enjoy Substance Designer, its the bees knees
Bit of a mashed up Asphalt - I'd quite like to be able to put gradient slops randomly across "Cells" of damage, are there any nodes that do that?