@Makkon - Wow thanks, thats very flattering! I used Tile Sampler as the basis to make this pattern, I didnt make any custom shapes and scatter them around.
Nice job Josh_lynch. How did you use the Tile Sampler node and not have overlapping forms? You didn't hand place any of the smaller stones to fill in the gaps? I didn't think it was possible to distribute shapes that way in SD yet without a manual layout of the primary forms. Can you please elaborate on your process. I'm sure many are wondering the same thing. Thank you.
Nice job Josh_lynch. How did you use the Tile Sampler node and not have overlapping forms? You didn't hand place any of the smaller stones to fill in the gaps? I didn't think it was possible to distribute shapes that way in SD yet without a manual layout of the primary forms. Can you please elaborate on your process. I'm sure many are wondering the same thing. Thank you.
Here's the method I use: Creates pillow forms and transforms them to outlines and solid random values for you to play with. Or, add another output for the pillow forms themselves. You can also increase or decrease the relative "Color Random" values (always keeping both very close to the same, otherwise the randomized greyscale output breaks) to have even more control of the rock sizes. A solution I'm gonna add for that is to create a function that controls both "Color Random" values with a single slider.
This has precision issues in that the random greyscale rock values aren't quite perfectly solid values, so using directional warps with "Value_Variation" as an input have to be handled more carefully. A value of 500 dir warp for example makes the resulting offset texture look super noisy. I'm hoping to work around this problem eventually.
@Makkon / @synergy11 - Thank you for your comments. I did not hand place anything, instead I used two "Tile Sampler" nodes and combined the data, see below
@somedoggy - Thanks for sharing your breakdown! I see a lot of similarities in how the materials were made
I have created a teaser image of sorts to show how the initial pattern was created. I will be working on a more in depth tutorial, very busy right now with work so I hope you all understand it may take a bit. I hope this helps for now.
I've been learning at home, and since I've been playing so much Uncharted 4, I really wanted to attempt some decent rock walls. This is my 4th attempt, still looks procedural, but I think I'm off to a good start.
@Makkon That's excellent One thing that tips me off are the cracks just going straight through multiple surfaces. Otherwise that's looking quite amazing!
@Bruno Afonseca Thanks man! I'll try to mask of those cracks in places somehow, shouldn't be too tricky. I might try what @somedoggy demonstrated with the rock cells, could be pretty handy for masking out slabs from cracks.
@MeshModeler Javier! That's looking rad, dude! Some of your peaks are getting chopped off which is a shame, but everything else is doing it for me.
Yeah, my goal with that was to make a rock-like generator that outputs solid outlines, "bubble" cell forms, and random flat values for each cell. It's really great despite the fact that there is some random noise in the flat values, pretty simple to overcome that with good design and a bit of blur tho!
I'd enjoy seeing how you produced those results. I love the clean forms.
I've been learning at home, and since I've been playing so much Uncharted 4, I really wanted to attempt some decent rock walls. This is my 4th attempt, still looks procedural, but I think I'm off to a good start.
This is a fantastic start Ben. If you can get a gradient mask of your major forms where each major form is a different gray value, you can use that as a directional warp with a very high value, like 200-500 and warp your small cracks. This will cause them to appear uniquely on the large forms if that is something you wish to achieve.
I am curious how much time people do spend on creating all those great textures in Substance Designer really?
In my own experience while it sometimes helps to make a nice things still it's a tremendous time eater . It tooks 3-4 more time than what I would do with Photoscan, Zbrush and still things often looks not real enough. Sometimes take days for countless tweaking. I feel I do a kind of weird sport of rivaling mother nature which is easily available just few steps from the office .
Besides everything I do in Substance designer turns extremely repetitive in actual game scene and no hi-pass would solve this without eliminating the quality of the surface. Loved their old Map Zone where you could re-compose/ move/scale procedural fragments manually. Was extremely helpful in solving this exact problem.
At the end of the day it is not about JUST getting a material out of designer. It is getting a completely procedural way to generate hundreds of textures from a few graphs. If you work smart you can create new materials almost instantly with little input. I created the first image above for work, fast, and then I generated about 8-10 unique materials with unique brick layouts in no time. I would have to individually sculpt those in Zbrush or make them individually in photoshop and that would have cost so much time.
Making a material in Substance is not a one off action, you are creating a new and powerful tool to generate multiple materials with a little bit of initial heavy lifting.
Practice. Photoscan and Zbrush can't touch some of the things you can easily do with Substance. But combining all those tools, you can relegate each to what it does best. Need a specific pattern for some tiles? Zbrush or Photoshop it and import into Substance. If you already made a tile Substance, great! Just plop the pattern into the graph and call it a day. Art direction wants 10 more patterns like this? Cool, draw them out and import to Substance. Those might take you 20 minutes a pop because all the hard detail work is done with the program that does it best. And it even keeps your visuals consistent for free!
It is most advantageous when you've got a lot on your plate. If you have a hundred objects to make, you can make a material library that you blend together for each object's material. Realized your dirt roughness is too low? Bump it up a tad and every object updates immediately. You won't get that with photoscan and zbrush.
QUACK! Thanks for the time estimates. You do it pretty quick with a great result. It takes me more usually .
One more thing I wonder is generating new unique materials after initial one . On my end it generates not exactly unique but rather very slightly different things , too similar to be another texture in same scene . Once I try to do it really new and unique it often crosses that very imperceptible border in-between looking true real and artificially procedural. So from those 8-10 it's just initial one that looks good. Same with repetitiveness , ones you do one that looks good any next one could be repetitive as hell. So I basically use SD only for bricks . tiles and such , things that are already repetitive in its nature.
Whoa, forgot to post this here! I recently finished a road/brick texture. Not too happy with the general material definition, but it was a fun exercise.
Practice. Photoscan and Zbrush can't touch some of the things you can easily do with Substance. But combining all those tools, you can relegate each to what it does best. Need a specific pattern for some tiles? Zbrush or Photoshop it and import into Substance. If you already made a tile Substance, great! Just plop the pattern into the graph and call it a day. Art direction wants 10 more patterns like this? Cool, draw them out and import to Substance. Those might take you 20 minutes a pop because all the hard detail work is done with the program that does it best. And it even keeps your visuals consistent for free!
It is most advantageous when you've got a lot on your plate. If you have a hundred objects to make, you can make a material library that you blend together for each object's material. Realized your dirt roughness is too low? Bump it up a tad and every object updates immediately. You won't get that with photoscan and zbrush.
Best response I have seen to justify substance designer. I think of designer as a hub in which all other tools eventually meet
I've been texturing since quake 3 days, just doing everything in photoshop, then progressing to zbrush/zapplink workflow. Substance designer blows old workflows off the planet. It's easy to learn, fun to use and super creative once you get a handle on the workflows. Even the best SD artist out there have not even scratched the surface of what is possible in SD. I would never EVER want to go back to texturing the old way. Another huge advantage to the creativity aspect of SD is that you get to see your results in real time as your creating them. Once I import my textures into UE4, they will look exactly the same as the SD viewport. That alone makes me love it. Give it a shot! You will never look back. (Well you will look back and laugh at the wasted time and restrictions of older workflows). I'm Never going back! Ok back to work.
Alright, so while this is my first post on polycount, I am however not new to SD at all. The issue I'm having though is with learning how to use fx-maps; there's very little in the way of documentation/videos over the subject and it's becoming a hindrance for me. I want to learn how to create diagonal herringbone pattern with an fx-map but I have absolutely no idea of how to go about doing so. Do any of you have any pointers/advice?
@JSlade the only documentation that I've been able to find at all is a small segment in this tutorial, and he goes into a little depth with FX maps. The rest of the tutorial might also be useful to you. http://store.steampowered.com/app/441450/
I started learning SD about 3-4 weeks ago. This is one of my first proper materials, some shabby roof tiles:
Looks great! The height for the mortar between the rooftiles could use some smoothing perhaps, and maybe add some moss/algae. You're off to an amazing start though! The results are very realistic.
Looks great! The height for the mortar between the rooftiles could use some smoothing perhaps, and maybe add some moss/algae. You're off to an amazing start though! The results are very realistic.
Thanks for the feedback! Good points. And yea i'm happy with how my first steps into SD turn out. I thought it would be much harder to get results that don't look super procedural. I had some experience with making macros for world machine beforehand tho. That definitely helped me to grasp the workflow in a relatively short time. Also used Brunos cracks and Rogelios AO and cavity nodes to get a nicer result.
Thanks Josh! Things I still want to tackle on this one are the more porous like smaller details for the brick, like grains of sand embedded in the brick like you see sometimes. Add an option for "casting" marks like indents or patterns, make the mortar stand out a bit more, and make the roughness pop a bit more. After that I'll optimise the graph for speed and readability and put it on Share
Just finished my very first substance following one of the tutorials on Youtube.
That's a great start already! It could use some dirt or chips/cracks here and there (For that, slope blur greyscale is your friend). For Arch Viz it could be used as is though.
Replies
Creates pillow forms and transforms them to outlines and solid random values for you to play with. Or, add another output for the pillow forms themselves. You can also increase or decrease the relative "Color Random" values (always keeping both very close to the same, otherwise the randomized greyscale output breaks) to have even more control of the rock sizes. A solution I'm gonna add for that is to create a function that controls both "Color Random" values with a single slider.
Here's my post explaining the functionality:
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2408785/#Comment_2408785
This has precision issues in that the random greyscale rock values aren't quite perfectly solid values, so using directional warps with "Value_Variation" as an input have to be handled more carefully. A value of 500 dir warp for example makes the resulting offset texture look super noisy. I'm hoping to work around this problem eventually.
I have created a teaser image of sorts to show how the initial pattern was created. I will be working on a more in depth tutorial, very busy right now with work so I hope you all understand it may take a bit. I hope this helps for now.
https://share.allegorithmic.com/libraries/1929
Enjoy!
@MeshModeler Javier! That's looking rad, dude! Some of your peaks are getting chopped off which is a shame, but everything else is doing it for me.
Yeah, my goal with that was to make a rock-like generator that outputs solid outlines, "bubble" cell forms, and random flat values for each cell. It's really great despite the fact that there is some random noise in the flat values, pretty simple to overcome that with good design and a bit of blur tho!
I'd enjoy seeing how you produced those results. I love the clean forms.
In my own experience while it sometimes helps to make a nice things still it's a tremendous time eater . It tooks 3-4 more time than what I would do with Photoscan, Zbrush and still things often looks not real enough. Sometimes take days for countless tweaking. I feel I do a kind of weird sport of rivaling mother nature which is easily available just few steps from the office .
Besides everything I do in Substance designer turns extremely repetitive in actual game scene and no hi-pass would solve this without eliminating the quality of the surface. Loved their old Map Zone where you could re-compose/ move/scale procedural fragments manually. Was extremely helpful in solving this exact problem.
6-8 hours: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YrnwP
~6 hours: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/R5RZO
At the end of the day it is not about JUST getting a material out of designer. It is getting a completely procedural way to generate hundreds of textures from a few graphs. If you work smart you can create new materials almost instantly with little input. I created the first image above for work, fast, and then I generated about 8-10 unique materials with unique brick layouts in no time. I would have to individually sculpt those in Zbrush or make them individually in photoshop and that would have cost so much time.
Making a material in Substance is not a one off action, you are creating a new and powerful tool to generate multiple materials with a little bit of initial heavy lifting.
It is most advantageous when you've got a lot on your plate. If you have a hundred objects to make, you can make a material library that you blend together for each object's material. Realized your dirt roughness is too low? Bump it up a tad and every object updates immediately. You won't get that with photoscan and zbrush.
One more thing I wonder is generating new unique materials after initial one .
On my end it generates not exactly unique but rather very slightly different things , too similar to be another texture in same scene . Once I try to do it really new and unique it often crosses that very imperceptible border in-between looking true real and artificially procedural. So from those 8-10 it's just initial one that looks good. Same with repetitiveness , ones you do one that looks good any next one could be repetitive as hell. So I basically use SD only for bricks . tiles and such , things that are already repetitive in its nature.
long time stalker first post this is my procedural rockwall inspired by rogelio and bradford smiths techniques
I recently finished a road/brick texture. Not too happy with the general material definition, but it was a fun exercise.
Video, flats and graph can be seen here. <--- Clicky
And as a bonus, here's a video about how to do an easy herringbone pattern.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sof5jCi4tII
Some work I've done:
the only documentation that I've been able to find at all is a small segment in this tutorial, and he goes into a little depth with FX maps. The rest of the tutorial might also be useful to you.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/441450/
And yea i'm happy with how my first steps into SD turn out. I thought it would be much harder to get results that don't look super procedural. I had some experience with making macros for world machine beforehand tho. That definitely helped me to grasp the workflow in a relatively short time. Also used Brunos cracks and Rogelios AO and cavity nodes to get a nicer result.
Crosspost from here.
More info here.
it was about a time to try SD and finally I think I'm getting somewhere. Although it's still wip. Blocks are inspired by Hugo Beyer tutorial.
My video tutorial "Fundamental Concepts With Substance Designer" is now available on Gumroad.
Gumroad - https://gum.co/qhmL
YouTube Overview Video - https://youtu.be/0DSJjPaT5Pc
And here's the graph :
https://cdn3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/756/659/large/adnan-chaumette-wood-graph.jpg?1465350440