Substance Designer : FX maps?
I've watched the new tutorials posted, and read the documentation on FX-maps. Though It really..barely..even touches the depth of them?
I am just extremely confused on how to use these FX maps, and they're the base of creating some great substances.
I understand a lot of it has to do with creating dynamic complex functions? I can not seem to find a lot of documentation on understanding what each does and when/how you use it. Which ones act as inputs, outputs...
I am just heavily confused! Ack!
I do not know what to ask to help me learn it, I just need someone to direct me.. So far all I know how to do is create a basic random rotation for a quadrant through the functions.. and how to stack quadrants, using input images/presets. Is that all there is to it, just blending and blending until I reach what I want?
Also, while it says it accepts greyscale, I always have to have it converted to a color because otherwise it is completely transparent on my FX. If I change the FX map to greyscale it just goes black.
I am so lost right now its almost painful.
I am just extremely confused on how to use these FX maps, and they're the base of creating some great substances.
I understand a lot of it has to do with creating dynamic complex functions? I can not seem to find a lot of documentation on understanding what each does and when/how you use it. Which ones act as inputs, outputs...
I am just heavily confused! Ack!
I do not know what to ask to help me learn it, I just need someone to direct me.. So far all I know how to do is create a basic random rotation for a quadrant through the functions.. and how to stack quadrants, using input images/presets. Is that all there is to it, just blending and blending until I reach what I want?
Also, while it says it accepts greyscale, I always have to have it converted to a color because otherwise it is completely transparent on my FX. If I change the FX map to greyscale it just goes black.
I am so lost right now its almost painful.
Replies
Our friend Kenny Lammers did a few tutorials though some time ago. It's done in Substance Designer 2, but apart from some cosmetic changes, the basics of the FXMaps creation remained the same in SD 4, so you shouldn't feel lost.
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Also look into the Iterate block, I think it's much more powerful than chaining quadrants. Though you'll have to do your own offset functions: 100 iterations just stacks 100 shapes on top of each other by default...
@Xoliul I'll see how up for it I am, I see almost everyone using it.. and using it in incredible ways. I figure I need to learn it if I am to do more than use a bunch of presets
The best source of information so far that i've found, regarding doing nested loops and discussing some of the lower-level intricacies of fx maps is this post : http://blog.runevision.com/2014/06/procedural-materials-with-substance.html - it's a post by Rune Scovbo Johansen, all credit to him. Discusses some of the intricacies of FX maps, like nested looping. You can do a lot of stuff without using super advanced FX maps stuff though, just by using iterations and making simple functions to randomize the offset, rotation, scale, etc.
If the post on rune's blog ever goes dead, I clipped it into my evernote for safe keeping.
We just added a new 2-part tutorial on using FX-Maps.
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Cheers,
Wes
For the moment Fxmaps is the only way to build these noises and Fxmaps is very specific to SD.
If you want something that looks like to a voronoi noise, you have to implement it (or try at least, voronoi is one which is very difficult to achieve with fxmaps..) using fxmaps.
How do i can change the rotation pivot of pattern input in a Quadrant (for an advanced FXMap setup)
I'm trrying to make grass leaves atlas, but it's always rotating at the center of the quadrant.