Over the month of September I am running a "Materials Mentorship" program through Patreon. The main goal of the mentorship is for the artist to create one or two materials over the course of a month with tools currently used in AAA production pipelines. The materials will be created referencing real life sources, as well, the focus will be on material definition, overall readability balance, and presentation.
These three artist will be posting their WIP images and discussing their process in this thread and I am really excited to see their progress take place over the coming weeks.
More about these artists....
Brandon Brown - www.brandonbrown3d.com
Tristan Meere - www.artstation.com/artist/advisablerobin
Ryan Dziurgot - www.artstation.com/artist/ryandziurgot
Materials Mentorship WIP Thread for September
interpolator
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So for this week I wanted to create some aged concrete, cracks, pebbles, erosion and the works. I ended up with a graph that can transform pretty liberally to create a few kinds of concrete with ideally the controls to change all that. My approach initially was to just dive right into it, start with some basic shapes to give it some wobbly feel, get some simple cracking, stripping lines and the noisy surface. I originally wanted to create an interior stone effect for exposed bits of the concrete to see the mixture of concrete and rock, I wanted to use an FXmap to do the masking but I wasn't really able to get it looking right so I pulled it out and instead used a similar fxmap to create a pocketing and rubble effect depending on how the final heightmap is flipped.
The cracks were a combination of some really simple warps on cells and using a method that Wes show in one of his twitch stream videos, where you use an edge detect on a splatter node that has some really polygonal shapes.
I think the outcome is close to what I originally imagined and saw from my reference gathering, but my biggest issue is that in a lot of my Substance work, and especially this one, a certain amount of it is almost accidental and I think that is both really cool and maybe not the best approach to take in a production environment.
I am hoping for the coming weeks to post more WIP shots and get these graphs up on Substance Share.
My graph and images are in spoilers so I don't make this a wall of images
I'm currently focusing on creating some type of Spanish floor tile made of terracotta or ceramic, with hand painted decals or with <br>a relief sculpture. Please if you have any crits send them my way! I'll be posting lots of updates!<br>I'll be using Zbrush & Substance Painter for the materials. Most renders will be from Marmoset!For this mentorship, I am creating the cobblestone from Acorn Street. My goal is to stay in Substance Designer and stay as true as I can to the reference. I am spending a large amount of time right now nailing down the initial shape of the stones. I had a lot of trial and error figuring out the best way for me to go about creating and tiling the initial shape but finally feel like I'm getting somewhere and can start pulling away from each rock. The rest of the week is finishing up overall shape and an initial rough pass.
@weareape I'm liking the shapes you've got! I think maybe a bit more variation in size and height could help it, just a subtle amount though!
@Ohios_007 It might just be me, but the middle lines look uniformly thicker then the rest. It looks like its just a problem when it tiles. I'm liking the edging and surfacing, it both got the sharp and blobby that these tiles have, really nice!
The way I got the damage to line up better with the cracks was actually just using a Directional Warp on the damage mask using the large crack's Distance node. This mostly achieved the effect I was looking for.
This is a simple setup for the cracks that Josh showed me. After this you can run the final version of the cracks through a few light directional warps and a slope blur to give it the jaggy cracked edges. You can find a similar effect that Wes show in a video for a stream he did on Allegorithmic's youtube page. Here. Around the 1:12:00 mark.
New update! Decided to go back and re sculpt everything yesterday. I was using a flat mesh to sculpt but I didn't have enough control over the edges and grout. So I sculpted one tile and turned it into a Insertmesh brush, dragged it out a bunch of times onto a flat surface, and then did additional sculpting to make the tiles look different. I still need to work on the grout and clean up the tiles but I'll be moving onto color this weekend!
Let me know if you have any crits!
@AdvisableRobin Thanks for the comments man. Yeah it was a tiling issue I've been trying to work on the line variation of the grout. Your materials are turning out great btw. Everything has a nice balance Its not too over powering with detail. Really good man.
@weareape The shapes are looking good! I would diffidently like to see some size variation and have them a bit more scattered around.
You could draw out the nanomesh object and then you can assign random rotations, offsets, and slight variations in scale. After you make one you can easily go back and make another variation in like 2 minutes.
Really digging this thread overall. Subbed to see what you guys come up with.
i'll look into it and see what I can do.
I'll probably create a subgraph to generate a bunch of small gravel shapes, what I'm most unsure about is how I'll get the color variation across each piece of gravel. I might just need a few different masks, I don't wanna just run the heightmap into a gradient map because then the albedo will change if the height does.
These are my main ref images
Some progress from earlier today. I went ahead and followed up with @Jack M. crits and used nanomesh to create the tiles. I'm currently creating a rough version that would be used for blending so I'm not too worried about tiling issues. The color is still in early development but Josh and I talked about how to push it further.
I'm going to create some color variety for each tile and then more color variety in each. To help push that I'm going to use a grunge mask to create harsher lines for the dirt and color difference. Currently the color looks a bit soft so I need to make some edges a bit harder. Once that's done i'll move onto the stencil, grout, and pebbles!
I wanna get the albedo blended better, you can find some blending errors if you look closely, also some of the spots with pure black AO don't have any detail in them so I need to fill that up.
I also wanna try and get more 3Dness to this texture, which will require a lot more noodling on the blending of the stones.
@weareape
The dirt and twigs look is coming through really nice. I think as you move into doing surfacing detail on the rocks you should consider redoing some of the surface chips, some of them have really harsh edges to them and don't really fit with the smooth shapes of the rocks.
I wouldn't go too crazy with detail though, perhaps create a few masks for the rocks and use that to create several types of rocks. You could use a gradient map probably to create different masks depending on the grayscale value of each stone. Just some very-subjective input. Its coming alone nicely though!
@Ohios_007 I'm really liking the colors so far. One thing that could either be painted in or a part of the sculpt is dirt buildup, especially around the sunken tiles, you'd imagine that as people walked over these for years that some of that dirt would get kicked around.
Some updates on the material. I've been working on color variance for the tiles, dirt, and the stencil. I still need more dirt build up along the edges and I'm not sure about the stencil. I tried a bunch of different designs so it's still a work in progress. The final design will tie in all the tiles so it's going to be much bigger. After I nail those 3 things I'll be moving on to grout and pebbles.
@weareape @AdvisableRobin Materials are looking great! @weareape the detail on your bigger stones look a bit too blurry but overall your material is turning out really well. @AdvisableRobin the color seems too blue but everything else is looking awesome.
@AdvisableRobin - Wow that has come a long way since I last saw it! I see the errors you are talking about in the color. We can look at that on Sunday and see whats up!
@Ohios_007 - Loving the depth variety in the stone work here and seeing some stencil work goes a long way! Looking forward to discussing this on Sunday and seeing more color updates :-)
I'm happy with how my stone generator turned out, I'll have to remember how I did it for future use.
@Ohios_007 One thing that is throwing me off is this little lip, not sure what is causing it but it immediately catches my eye. Other then that this is starting to look pretty rad man!
Feedback is always welcome of course.
The next material I want to try to tackle is actually a Bradford Smith material that he created for the weekly challenge. http://bradfolio.com/art/substance/substance-red-rock-cliff-face/ is the reference for this week. This is probably some of the craziest substance work I've seen and have absolutely no clue how he did it, but I figure if I take a crack at it I might learn a thing or two.
@AdvisableRobin - That color variety is what I am talkin about!
Its still a bit blobby and doesn't have a ton of sense to the structure yet.
I started to push the color, dirt, and a tiny bit for the grout. I'm still working on the stencil. I may move towards a engraved look but we'll see how this last week pans out. Other than that I need to work on grout, pebbles, and final presentation. Let me know if you have any crits!
@AdvisableRobin thanks for the comments! that weird little lift in the tile was from a height problem but it's fixed! Your gravel came out awesome btw. Really nice work.
@Ohios_007 Something about how the grout is bugging me. I'd maybe try brightening it up and if you can give the tiles less height, looking at the ref they should be pretty close to level with the grout and the grout almost ramps up to edges. The grout also could use some more information in the normal, its reading really flat and smooth right now and the color variation doesn't seem to have any presence within any of the other maps, height or normal, so it is losing that essence believably where each map informs each other. Just some thoughts! Its looking great though, I'm super digging the color and the aging on the tiles.
Also with your presentation it would be great to see just the model and texture itself without the HDRI sky in the background.
Looking forward to seeing what else you do with it.
@Poinball The Marmoset viewer doesn't support Height maps so it looks pretty poopy without it. I'll look into bringing this into Sketchfab for you.
@AdvisableRobin I agree on the grout! just haven't made time to work on it. I plan on really pushing it this last week. For the height I'm not really trying to match my ref 100% I want to break it up a bit more but i'll look into bringing it down a bit.
@3DKyle yeah the grout diffidently needs some work and thanks for the presentation crits! I'll look more into this for the final.
I hope there is more to come from you guys!
Cheers!
Right now the tiles have a very high roughness. Like it looks really rough to me. While at the same time the sculpt is very clean. I think the tiles need to have more small porous detail and tiny chips in order to sell the really rough look it currently has.
Or if you want to shoot more for the concepts you're working off of you should probably clean up the tiles, and make them more polished with variation in the roughness map.
I also think you need to work on your final presentation some more as well. Give some definitive light direction, ao, maybe a slight amount of sharpen, etc. Also try and get angles that catch some reflections/roughness on the material.
I think your texture could improve with the addition of 2 things.
The first being that the soil should probably be quite a bit darker. I think having that contrast in the texture would make it more interesting and come off as less flat.
The second thing is I think adding some light touches of moss or just some small foliage such as clovers in the cracks would help add some really nice color variation in the texture.